Website Evolution - The CMS Breakdown
Depending on who you are, we live in an evolving world. Technological evolution occurs at astonishing speeds, especially when it comes to the internet. The technology which allows us to interact with the web is no exception. We are going to take you back in time and explain how website's were made in the past. Then we'll tell you why the "Content Management System" has made it's way to be the most used web development tool today.
The History - Static Websites
Before CMS websites (ie. Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla), there were these things called static websites. The static website has been around since the world wide web (WWW) started back in 1991. They consisted of user created pages arbitrarily defined by the website publisher. These pages were likely located on a web server within the same state as client who was browsing them. To make changes to these websites, you'd have to edit a local copy of your website's files. This means opening the html file and browsing through the line code until you were able to find the content which you wanted to update. If you were on a Windows based platform you might have used one of these methods:
- Notepad - A simple text editor in Windows (very unfriendly HTML editor)
- Homesite - An HTML Editor (This was more friendly but still required you to sift through alot of code)
- Dreamweaver - An HTML Authoring Tool (Definately the friendliest although overkill for just updating the content)
Once you have updated the web content locally, you would then have to upload the files via a FTP client.
Now this type of static site update operation may not sound so difficult to the reader. Believe us, in all the years we've been providing our services, not one of our customers has opted to update their site on their own. When it comes to managing websites, the vast majority of site owners didn't want to deal with the hassle of updating their static webpages.
The Future - CMS Websites
CMS is today's standard for website development. CMS (Content Management System) websites allows you, the owner, to directly manage the web content including text and images. By logging into the website with a username and password, making changes is as easy as publishing a word document on your laptop. Instead of dealing with a text editor, the CMS system provides you with an easy to use interface that is similar to today's popular word processors. It's easy as that! Saving the changes to the CMS immediately reflects the new content on the live website.
The Website Environment
A CMS consists of much more than just a word processing web interface. It's an environment which allows you to control how the web content is presented to the viewer. It's also possible to manage multiple users who can contribute to your website, thus providing fresh new content which today's search engine's crave.
Being Business Oriented
Like most all businesses today, a business website must undergo constant change and evolution. Not only applying to the content and images, the functionality of the site must be expandable and scalable. By using a CMS you can provide an environment for integrating popular website funtions such as:
- A Rotating Image Gallery
- Advertisments and Banners
- Calendars and Events
- E-Commerce (Shopping Cart)
- Newsfeeds and Blogs
- and the list goes on...
In order to integrate this functionality into a static website, it would have to be custom coded, resulting in many hours of testing and debugging. Whereas with a CMS solution, much of the functionality already exists as a pre-developed extension. These extensions may be integrated via the system's administrative interface also known as the "Back-end".
The Conclusion
It's only a matter of time until most if not all websites will be utilizing a CMS. This technology has too many advantages over the old static websites we developed back in the 90's.
