Web terms SME operators need to understand #8: CMS

It’s one of the most empowering online assets a small business can have, yet it costs what amounts to petty cash.

It will save you a fortune in funds otherwise spent on your web designer updating your website, while giving you the ability to address a competitive online action immediately.

Best of all, it puts you on a level pegging with much larger organisations – at least when it comes to managing your website.

And it’s a development that’s virtually levelled the playing field when it comes to being able to offer a truly dynamic, up-to-date and ultimately more relevant website to your customers and other stakeholders.

Yes, a Content Management System (CMS) is virtual gold to the smaller business operator.

Control over your own website

A CMS is essentially a webpage editor. Unlike website design software, a CMS allows its users (or webmasters) to concentrate on the “page-level” content instead of the overall website design.

It does this by way of a “WYSIWYG” (What You See Is What You Get) page editor (like that illustrated below). Instead of the clunky and clumsy HTML code you once had to learn to edit your webpages, these editors contain tools not unlike those found in popular document editors like MS Word.

Changes when you want them

In this way, business operators can make unlimited changes to their websites without either having to do a web design course or having to worry about the impact of their changes on the overall look of the website.

Better still, it moves the website away from being a static “brochure in cyberspace” to a dynamic and organic living document.

In fact, it becomes more like a regular magazine cover – offering a new look every month (or so) and providing customers with plenty of reasons to “look inside”.

Managed carefully, it becomes the face of an ever-changing online presence that keeps customers coming back for more.

And now they’re affordable

Like all software technology, CMS’ have gradually reduced in price to be well within the reach of smaller business.

If there is no budget at all, you can get a CMS with hosting for nothing at all. But you can now get fully fledged hosted CMS with accompanying shopping cards, email marketing systems, extranet, survey builders and more for less than $50 a month.

When you consider the cost of creating the printed equivalent – a professional full colour brochure – the cost of these website platforms is miniscule.

But like all things technological, CMS systems can be good, bad and ugly.

Here are a few features worth adding to your shopping list:

Version rollback

We’ve all done it. We’ve pushed the “save” button before we found a nasty error on the page. With rollback there’s no need to worry as the system stores previous versions of pages. Just select the version you want and “hey presto!”, your site is back to where it was.

Dynamic homepage tools

Busy smaller business operators don’t have time to constantly be fiddling with their all important front or homepage of their websites. “Add to homepage” capabilities mean that you can bring a neat headline, image and teaser to the front page of your website with just a tick of a box.

Paste from Word

Unfortunately the computer language of the World Wide Web, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is considerably different from the computer language of MS Word.  Meaning you need to convert it to something that will work will in HTML. Some CMS are smart enough to convert this for you “on the fly” (in real, seamless time).

Image editors

While image editors like Photoshop are fairly commonplace in larger organisations, they are yet another expense for cash-strapped smaller business. But good CMS will include image editors to help re-format images to something more friendly to web browsers and download limits.

Site-wide content holders

There’s nothing more frustrating for the webmaster or website manager than having to alter every single page of a website. Good CMS provide plenty of content “holders” – areas that you can add content that will align itself to different sections of the website, or even every page of the website.

Animation modules

Well-considered and prepared animation can add colour and movement to your website and help bring attention to your promotions, deals, news and so on. But instead of having to have an animation created every time you want to change this, a good CMS will have provisions of an editable animated area or module, which allows you to drop images into a folder and have the module do the rest.

Schedule an update

Sometimes you or your staff won’t be available to update your website when you need to. But good CMS will include a publication scheduler, which allows you to set the time and date of the publication and deletion of your article or alteration. In other words, you prepare the alteration to the website at one time but program the change to happen at a time to suit you.

These are but a few of the great features a good CMS can offer. 

So remember, when planning for your next website, make sure a good CMS is on your wishlist.

In addition to being a leading eBusiness educator to the smaller business sector, Craig Reardon is the founder and director of independent web services firm The E Team which was established to address the special website and web marketing needs of SMEs in Melbourne and beyond.