Building Your Website's Foundation with the Right CMS
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As the internet continues to grow and change at a rapid pace, one facet of the web continues to stand the test of time as the most important rule: Content is king. While your website’s aesthetics and usability will always be important, they alone will not draw in an audience. Written, visual, or product content - the key aspect of your website is what it offers people. Creating this content is paramount to a website’s success, and having a quality CMS as the foundation of your site is what makes this content creation faster, easier, and cheaper.
CMS, or ‘Content Management System’, is a technology that rests at the back end of your website, invisible to the public. It takes pure content and media and places it into pre-made pages. This separation of content from design means that requests to a web developer to make changes to your site’s content are a thing of the past. Administrators of modern CMS-outfitted sites can easily create and edit site content without the need for any experience writing code. CMSs also give advanced control over details like categorization, related articles, files and images - anything one might need for effective content creation. Performing actions like writing an article and scheduling its publication, or adding in new subpages are made quick and simple. In addition, CMSs come stock with many technologies that make adding features such as member accounts, profiles, and comment systems faster and cheaper than seeking out fully custom-coded solutions, and are proven to be safe and secure.
The are multiple CMSs available for commercial and private use - here at Headspace, we primarily rely on ExpressionEngine, but there are dozens of others with varying levels of popularity. We choose ExpessionEngine primarily for its expandability, where there are hundreds of modules and add-ons available offering everything from advanced control over SEO to full eCommerce solutions. While most modules come at a price, they remain a much more affordable option compared to custom code. With hundreds of professional developers using ExpressionEngine worldwide, taking an existing site built in ExpressionEngine to another shop for changes or additions ensures that the new developers can dive right in, proficient with the technology. Ultimately, a universally recognized CMS will do wonders for your site’s continued development.
A quality CMS, well considered selection of add-ons, and an intelligent setup can expand the scale and features of a website to enterprise levels in much less time and for much less money. It removes the middleman between you and the quality content that drives traffic to your website, and gives you the tools to create and manage that content in an easy and approachable way. As time goes on, content will continue to reign as the most important part of any web endeavour, and CMSs have gone from being a helpful luxury to an absolutely necessary tool that will help you build the foundation of a new website.
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