Website Manegement In Florida | "The Evolution of Content Management Systems"

Source    : http://blog.in10sity.net/

By          : in10sity
Category: Website Manegement In Florida, 

Posted   : Website Maintenance

CMS (Website Maintenance)

Having been in the web design business for the better part of 15 years, it is amazing to see how far we have come with content management systems. Remember the days where you would have to call your web designer to get a simple edit done and it would take a week and cost $100? Unfortunately for some of you, that is still your reality. If you’re still in that boat, I’m here to tell you that there is a better way. 

First, let’s look at a quick evolution of Content Management Systems: 

In early 1996, Adobe came out with an application called PageMill. At the time, I thought it was going to be a life saver as I was already sick of coding by hand. Let’s just say the product was more of a sign of things to come rather than being very useful. 

In August of that same year, a welcome replacement for PageMill came out called GoLive 1.0 for Mac users. This tool seemed like the cure to code cancer. However, as a coder, I hated it. I spent a ton of time making my code clean just to see GoLive chew it up and make it look (and run) awful. I saw entire sites get ruined when the source file became corrupt. 

In 1997 a program called Macromedia Dreamweaver came to the rescue. It balanced the needs of the designer and the coder so they could work together in blissful harmony. Our development team still uses Dreamweaver to this day. By the way, Adobe bought Macromedia in 2005 and in 2008, they killed GoLive. Boo hoo. 

In the early 2000′s, web designers and developers started looking for a way to empower their clients to update their own websites. However, handing Dreamweaver over to a client was like giving a chainsaw to a three-year old. Much to our delight, the makers of Dreamweaver had been listening and published companion software called Contribute. This was the answer to our prayers — or so we thought. Turns out Contribute created a whole new slew of support issues and wasn’t much of an improvement. 

You’re probably thinking, “Hey, those aren’t content management systems!” and I’d have to agree. Dreamweaver is a development application that is the equivalent to the cockpit of a 747. However, back in the day that is all we had and if you couldn’t master one of those programs or didn’t want to pay for a copy, you were calling your webmaster and paying him or her to make your changes. What we needed at the time was a tool that the “mere mortal” could use to update their website without destroying it in the process. 

What we needed was a browser based system. With that in mind, I’ll continue with our CMS evolution… 

Frustrated, developers took matters into their own hands and started to write home brewed solutions that would run through a web browser. The early web based scripts would enable an administrator to update limited content blocks on pages with no preview or database functionality. You were pretty much working directly on the HTML pages. 

With innovation being what it is, developers were creating custom solutions for clients that were pretty darn effective — and expensive. Some of the better systems that were created for client projects were so good, developers started to brand their content management systems, resell them or, gasp, give them away. This is where a fundamental split in business philosophies occurred and continues to this day. 

Open Source CMS. For those of you who don’t know what open source software is, it is basically code that is created and shared by a developer community, sometimes in the tens of thousands, and published freely. The allure to open source software is its low acquisition cost, which enables cash strapped smaller businesses to get into pretty sophisticated packages cheaply. Having built a company on this model myself, I can tell you it is a pretty compelling way to go. The problem with open source CMS systems, in particular, are the hidden support costs that crop up later when you need to move your site, add something custom, or find a competent programmer who will understand the code. Solutions such as WordPress dominate the open source CMS landscape today. I could write an entire article on this subject but I’ll leave that for later. 

Proprietary CMS. These systems are commercially sold content management systems that are usually written and owned by companies that have the talent and resources to support, customize, and innovate on their platforms with a tightly knit developer team. For larger organizations where acquisition costs are not as difficult to overcome and there is a need for a custom tailored fit, proprietary systems are almost always the way to go. Integrating corporate databases, commerce, and accounting systems becomes a much less daunting task for a company that knows the code of its own CMS and has the developers on staff that can navigate it. Finally, support issues are reduced considerably when working with the team who wrote the CMS you are licensing as opposed to waiting for a faceless community to assist you via an online help forum. 

Well, I guess the cat’s out of the bag and you’ve figured out, if I were to have my druthers, I would go with a proprietary content management system. I’m not just towing the company line here. As I mentioned, I’ve learned a thing or two about the open source business model and, along the way, I see the benefits of going proprietary from a long-term point-of-view. As long as you have a simple website that doesn’t need anything custom and you don’t envision it growing much, open source may be your best bet. If you have more ambitious needs and support and customization are key, I recommend the proprietary route. Either way you go, there is a better way to keep your website maintained without knowing HTML and being held hostage by your web designer.