There are a few reasons why using a Content Management System (CMS) can be a good fit for your company. Many of the most popular CMS’ were designed for blogging, such as WordPress for example, but have since become much more versatile and able to do far more than just blogging. Let’s go through a few different reasons (of which there are many more!):
Interactive:
A natural first reason that a CMS can be useful, particularly one such as WordPress that was designed for blogging, is that it can allow you to easily interact with your customers or potential customers. You can generally easily add a blog to a website in a CMS, you can also leave different pages open for comments as well. This can add some great dimension to an otherwise “static” webpage.
Easy to Use:
Another reason CMS’ are very popular is because many of them are incredibly easy to use. I’ve often told my clients “If you can use webmail like Hotmail or Yahoo, you can use WordPress.” You don’t have to know any code like HTML, granted basic understanding of coding can come in handy, to do blog posts, updates to your content, changing pictures, etc. But publishing a blog post with photos, embedded YouTube videos, etc, is really not too much more difficult that writing it out in Word.
Cost Savings:
The advantage of a CMS being easy to use is that it can also save you a lot of money. Because you would be able to do many of the updates on your own you could save a lot of money otherwise spent on a Web Designer. This way you can do basic updates to content, publish blog posts, update photos, etc on your own and then only need your web designer when it comes to the larger changes. Additionally, there are many plug-ins available to do many tasks from Calendars, to slideshows, Event Booking, etc, which can save you money having one custom built for you by simply using an already existing plug-in.
Great for Search Engine Optimization:
One thing that helps a website rank well with Search Engines is fresh and regularly updated content. Search Engines HATE stale, unchanging content, so being able to easily update content works to your advantage SEO wise as well. There are often great plug-ins available to help with SEO as well. That being said, when you are editing, changing or adding additional content you need to make sure you keep in mind what your keywords are for your website so you don’t delete them by accident when you re-fresh content, or make sure you incorporate them in new content. If you don’t know what your keywords are, or need to have some found for you, make sure you speak to a SEO expert!
Easy to Change:
A final point I want to mention is that with most CMS’ making site-wide overhauls and updates is much easier to do. The whole site is generally based on a template so if you edit, change or even replace the template you can quite quickly have a very different look to your website.
There are many more benefits to a good CMS, these are just a few of the ones that I generally highlight to my clients or contacts. A very important thing to keep in mind though is that not all CMS’ were created equal! Some are very easy to use, some are near impossible to use and negate many of the points mentioned above. We’ll touch more on that in our next post where we’ll be talking about how and when to get out of a bad CMS.