A Content Management System (CMS) allows you to easily change your own web site, without calling a web designer.
CMS web sites are built upon a special system, with an "admin" -- the panel you use to make changes to your pages. The admin should be very easy to use, and work something like a word processer program, like MS Word, for example.
What you don't want, however, is Microsoft Front Page, widely known for making web sites that look awful on anything but Internet Explorer, among other problems. A lot of people do not use I.E. to browse the Web.
Also a bad idea: Using an "off the shelf" CMS system, designed to be adapted to work with all kinds of web sites. Because they are designed to fit everything, they are generally too bloated and cumbersome to work with. (One size fits none!)
The Desert Heart CMS system, on the other hand, is just right. We built it to work with the sites we make, and we customize it to suit yours. And it has all these fine qualities:
A CMS should:
- Be easy to use
- Be password protected
- Require no additional software purchase or license
- Be accessible with just a computer and a web browser
- Have permissions that allow certain people within your organization to make tentative changes, and their supervisors to approve and apply them
- Limit changes in the pages to specified “content areas”
- Allow you to see what your changes might look like before you commit to them
- Let you cut and paste text from your word processing program into your site
- Let you easily format text on your pages (bold, italic, bigger, smaller, etc.)
- Allow you to easily upload and place images from your local hard disk to your web pages, re-sizing “on the fly” as needed
- Let you choose from different page templates, to best suit the character & content of any given page
- Allow you to upload and automatically link PDFs to your site
- Easily and automatically make a link from any page in your site to any other page in your site
- Let you add or delete pages, and have the changes be automatically reflected in your site’s navigation panel
- Let you add or change search engine related tags like keywords, page description, and alt tags
- Allow more advanced coders to paste in HTML
- Have a tablemaker that lets you easily put up and change table-type data in your site, like a calendar or directory
- Have an Online Help Manual you can easily follow when needed
- Be built with proven, legacy programming tools that won’t be obsolete for a long long time
- Be solid, dependable and bug-free
- Be easy to use. (Did we already say that? Well, it’s the most important part!)
Want to know more about how to change your own web site?
Just give us a call.
