Your Online Presence > Managing Content

Using CMS to update simple websites

By Laura Quinn, Idealware
Lasa Information Systems Team

As important as getting a website is keeping it updated. Choosing the right CMS can make it easier to keep information up to date and allow development of your website.

The second of two articles looking at website content management for simple sites, see the first article Solutions for Managing Content on Simple Sites.

This article is based on the  Idealware article A Few Good Tools to Manage Content on Simple Sites. Idealware provide candid information to help nonprofits choose effective software. For more articles and reviews, go to www.idealware.org.

If you’re looking to build a Web site to grow with you and become feature-rich over time, there’s little argument: using a Content Management System (CMS), is the right way to go. A CMS helps you set up your own site, create pages, update pages, add new navigation, and more, all through a Web-administration tool. These tools are notably more complex to setup, and a bit more complicated to update than the Web-site-in-a-box tools, but they are also vastly more powerful: a site built with Web-site-in-a-box tools will be fairly generic looking, but a CMS can support hundreds or thousands of pages, display a custom look for your site, and allow you to choose from a huge menu of extra features.

Open-source systems in particular offer several advantages. The software is free, and you’re able to do anything you want with it, including modifying the code (should you need to) down the road. Another key advantage is that standard open-source CMSs often come pre-installed in shared hosting environments. If your hosted site has a control panel, check to see if it offers an interface for one-click installation of software packages (for instance, look for a tool called Fantastico), which will let you easily activate many open-source CMSs, including the ones described below.

Joomla

If you want a solution that is relatively easy to implement but still effective for much larger sites down the road, Joomla may be a great choice. Joomla focuses on usability, and anyone who’s technically adventurous can get a substantial (albeit fairly generic-looking) site up without the need for any specific skills. If you’d like to have a custom look to your site, you’ll need someone with HTML and CSS skills to create that look for you.

Joomla supports most straightforward sites out of the box, but its extended community also offers hundreds of plug-ins that you can add to support additional functionality, such as forms, event calendars, directories, and much more. Both the core CMS and all the plug-ins are supported by an extensive user community that is friendly to novice users. While there’s no official “support,” questions that are posted to user forums are generally answered quickly and usefully.

Setting up a Joomla site is more of an investment than creating one with a Web-site-in-box tool. If you would like your site to have a custom layout, learning to do so in Joomla will likely require more effort than setting up a site that’s designed to be updated with Contribute. However, your efforts will be rewarded with a site that can grow with you for a long time to come.

WordPress

Better known as a blog tool, WordPress is also sometimes used as a simple CMS for uncomplicated sites — particularly those that feature news, articles, or other content that works in a way similar to a blog. WordPress is not as easy to set up as Joomla (if you’re setting up something other than a blog), so you’ll likely want help from someone with WordPress experience.

WordPress is notably less powerful than Joomla in supporting functionality beyond pages, blogs, and news, but this can be an advantage for simple sites: its administration interface is by default very stripped-down and easy to navigate, with no need to contend with a bunch of functionality that you won’t use. For example the London ICT Champion site was created using Wordpress.

The CMS Your Trusted Web Developer Knows

What if one of your staff members, or a trusted consultant or volunteer, is advocating a CMS that they’ve used before? This might make sense — after all, one of the biggest factors in choosing a CMS is the learning curve. Moreover, there are many systems — for instance, Drupal, EZPublish, ModX, PHPWebSite, ExponentCMS — that would be compatible with a variety of sites. Before going this route, however, take into account the following considerations.

• Is there a community of users for the CMS? If your Web developer has built a CMS herself, chances are that there won’t be a lot of people to help you with questions or in expanding the site. However, if your Web site is built on a reasonably well-known CMS, there’s likely to be a whole community of users who can help provide support or Web site development if the person who built the site is no longer around.
• Can the CMS be hosted on a typical shared-hosting environment? Ask your developer if there’s any special hosting needs for the CMS. Developers who come from a corporate background in particular may not realize that building on, say, a .NET or Python platform may require special hosting considerations.
• Can you understand how to use it? Ask for a demo of how you would edit articles, create events, or other everyday activities, as well as of less-common features such as creating site users, updating navigation, or the like. Some of the open-source CMSs in particular are geared towards more technical users, and can be difficult to use.

If you answered "yes" to all of these questions, then go for it. Using a CMS that’s familiar to the person who’s developing the site can save a lot of time? and frustration.

Is it accessible?

Accessibility measures the extent to which a CMS abides by World Wide Web Consortium standards for access, particularly for visitors with impaired sight. The core principle is that all site content should ‘degrade gracefully to text’ so that it can be read by a speech reader or text-only browser.

CMS vary wildly on this area with some being not too bad on the display-side, which is what site visitors see when they arrive at the site, but completely inaccessible on the administration-side, which is where the site is controlled by contributors, editors, and administrators.
Some other CMS systems achieve similar desktop application results by using layout tools like frames and tables that are discouraged by W3C accessibility standards.

This therefore presents a dilemma whereby precisely those features that make the application pleasant to use, also make it inaccessible. There may be situations where a small organisation can argue that non-sighted users will never be required to carry out site administration so discrimination is not an issue, but this is a major consideration for an organisation employing several people.

Finding the Right Solution

When choosing a content management method, start with the technical expertise that’s available to get you up and running. If there’s no one technically adventurous to help you out, then you’ll be limited to Web-site-in-a-box or hosted integrated tools. If you have someone adventurous and technically oriented but without specific expertise, Joomla may be a good solution.

If, on the other hand, you can find or hire a professional to build the site for you, you have more options. Building a site to be updated through Contribute is an inexpensive option that allows even technophobes to make updates, though it’s not a platform that will easily grow with you through the years. Joomla, WordPress, or another standard CMS your developer recommends might also be a great choice for a scalable Web site that can grow with you.

At the end of the day, what's important is to choose a tool that you’ll actually use. Regardless of what people may say is the “best” tool, if you’re not comfortable with it, then it won’t help you create that up-to-date Web site that will show the world the importance of your cause, the credibility of your organization, and all the great things that you’re doing.

Thanks to TechSoup for its financial support of this article, as well as to the nonprofit technology professionals who provided recommendations, advice, and other help:

• Steve Backman, Database Designs Associates, Inc.
• Heather Gardner-Madras, gardner-madras | strategic creative
• Michelle Murrain, MetaCentric Technology Advising
• Eric Leland, Leland Design
• Laura Quinn, Idealware
• Kirill Sokolov, St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary