There was a time when the internet had a handful of sites which featured a limited amount of data, but today we are living in the age of internet revolution and the sheer amount information available online is simply mind boggling. In the past webmasters were content with a few HTML pages on their site and with a small site it made sense to use programs like Macromedia and Microsoft Front Page to revise and make changes to their website template. However, this entailed quite a bit of work with navigation, hassles to update each web page and headers and footers.
Some of the primary issues that people encountered when using these content management systems of the yesteryears were:
A pain in the neck code: The advertisements screamed that these editors could get the job done in a jiffy without the need to meddle around in the HTML source code but the reality was that webmasters would have to inevitably get to the back end to sort the HTML source code and this could be quote time consuming depending on the expertise of the person with HTML.
Cumbersome site updates: Making changes to a site template meant that every web page would have to be changed manually; then re uploaded to the server; this again tool a lot of time and its toll on the resources used in the process. This was the time when broadband internet was still in its infancy and uploading the revised pages could be nothing short of tedious with a slow phone line connectivity
SEO could make you cry: Search engine optimization efforts would also have to be incorporated on every page, the webmasters would have to manually insert the H1 headers and the title tags.
Data loss was a very real risk: Given the fact, that several site editors were used in conjunction with each other or they were downloaded from numerous locations meant that if the web master were to forget to download the most recent version lf the site, the site updates would be overwritten causing a loss of hundreds of hours of work and a lot of data just because the webmaster made the mistake of clicking the upload button too soon.
Even though the latest version of the Adobe Dream waver is a far cry from the older archaic version and one no longer has to worry about messy code and site uploads are considerably faster thanks to broadband connections; some of the original annoyances and issues still persists when it comes to the simple HTML sites
The World is Introduced to the CMS (Content Management System)
As the name suggests CMS helps you to take care of the content on your site, this includes uploading new data, revising existing content etc. So with a CMS you can create, delete or edit the web pages on your site without venturing close to the source code. If you have a large site CMS can be nothing short of a boon. You do not have to back up the data because the content is stored in a site database which is on the web server. So there is no risk of data loss. For instance, ecommerce sites and blogs use CMS system more than 98 of the time
If you feel that the concept of a CMS sounds complicated and that using tem for your site can be expensive, you could not be further away from the truth. There are numerous full featured CMS available at no cost at all. Among the most popular free Content Management Systems are WordPress and Drupal. You can download both these systems for free and install them on your web server. Both of them have been developed by an open source community so ease of installation and use are key components of these systems.
So if you are not already using a CMS for your website, you are losing out on a world of benefits.
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