What is CMS Website (Content Management System)?
A content management system (CMS) allows you to manage the website’s content with ease. You have control of almost everything on your websites such as text, images, links, and menus.
For simplicity’s sake, think of it as Facebook for example. You log in to your website admin panel, add new pages, and update or delete existing ones. Same as you manage your Facebook profile ( images, statuses, comments, and so on).
Back in the day, there were only static websites that you had no control over. We used to build without a content management system. Because of that, you needed a developer whenever you wanted to do a simple website update.
static sites are still here and are a great alternative. The appearance of new tools such as static site generators made them popular again. We would suggest going with a static site generator if you need a website consisting of a few pages tho. They make development and “going live” much faster. But the issue arises once you have a lot of pages that need constant updates.
Content management system, however, allows you to do it yourself and with ease. You don’t need to know and touch the website’s code at all; That’s a developer’s job after all. Everything is visual and intuitive, and in the end, you even get to save some money because you do it on your own.
Content management system makes it easier for developers as well
It allows us to focus on the core design and logic of your website and build it faster. We don’t reinvent the wheel since common features like Login, Media Uploads, Menus come out of the box.
We then take it from there. Build on top of it and customize it to fit your needs and be intuitive for you to understand and use.
The technical aspect of the CMS is that it uses a back-end programming language and a database. PHP, Ruby, Python, MySQL, and MongoDB to name a few. So everything is dynamic and with each update, you change and save the content to a database.
Static sites, as already stated, do not need a back-end programming language and a database. We code them with the standard website “building blocks”: HTML, CSS, and sometimes Javascript.
There are many Content Management Systems
We can code CMSs from scratch, but that means reinventing the wheel without the need. They should be a starting point for building a website. And we should focus on the business logic instead of wasting time coding a CMS from scratch. There are a few tested and proven solutions that make developers’ and users’ lives a bit easier.
A few Content Management Systems that stood apart throughout the WWW’s history are WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. There are also Content Management Systems that exist for E-commerce websites only. Some of the most notable ones are Shopify, WooCommerce, Big Commerce, and Magento.
The evolution of Javascript and rest-API-driven development led to a new “CMS breed”. It’s called Headless CMS. But E-commerce and Headless CMSs are a topic of their own.
Check out our open-source WordPress starter theme
It supports React, Vue and Svelte, includes a framework for creating custom Gutenberg blocks, and so much more. You will love it.
WordPress is the de facto industry standard and our CMS of choice
WordPress started as a blogging platform, but it evolved into a full-featured CMS. We can manage every kind of website with it these days.
From few-pages sites all the way to large-scale ones including E-Commerce. WooCommerceis an E-Commerce Content Management System. It is built on top of WordPress and transforms a simple CMS to an online shop Content Management System.
WooCommerce is our tool of choice for developing online shops. It is a tested and proven solution loved by many.
Some large brands/names that power their websites by WordPress and Woocommerce are:
- TechCrunch
- The New Yorker
- BBC America
- Dreamhost’s Blog
- Bloomberg Professional
- The official Star Wars Blog
- Beyonce
- The Walt Disney Company
In fact, WordPress powers 33.6% of all the websites on the Internet, according to W3Techs. When we are speaking about other CMSs, WordPress dominates with a 60.5% market share.
WordPress is a mature platform for building websites that constantly evolves. It has a great community behind it and is one of the best-organized documentation for developers.
Its newest update is called Gutenberg. It is a complete rewrite of the page editor, at least for now. The WordPress team is working on rewriting the entire WordPress. The goal is to improve the user experience of editing pages and managing websites.
Why your website should run on WordPress and how it can help your business?
If the facts and statements we wrote already about aren’t enough to convince you that your website should run on WordPress, read on. Here are some of the most important aspects of it that would help you get the most out of your WordPress website.
- WordPress is free software. It means that you download it, upload it on the server and you can create any kind of website with it. There are absolutely no fees for using it.
- Its large ecosystem of themes and plugins allows WordPress to be easily customizable. If you can’t afford a custom website, you can use one of the free themes or buy a premium one. But if you are serious about your business, that’s not the road you want to take. Premium themes are full of unnecessary features that slow down a website. That then negatively impacts SEO and ranking. We prefer designing and coding custom WordPress sites from scratch. By doing that, we make sure that your website will be tailored to your needs. It will be SEO and load time optimized and bug-free, and in the end, you get a unique design as opposed to a theme that a large number of other websites are using.
- WordPress is SEO friendly. It is written using standard compliance high-quality code and produces semantic markup. In non-geek terms, this makes search engines “love” WordPress. WordPress sites tend to rank higher than others in search engines. Among the large WordPress ecosystem is a plugin called Yoast SEO. Along with custom SEO optimizations, Yoast can do wonders for your rankings.
- WordPress’s admin panel is intuitive and easy to use and manage your website.
- It is safe and secure – WordPress is developed with security in mind, and it is considered to be a very safe and secure platform to run a website.
- WordPress supports different media types out of the box. Whether you are working with images, .gifs, video, audio, Youtube embeds and many more, WordPress can handle it all with a breeze.
- It’s highly customizable – It means that we can build a WordPress admin panel uniquely tailored to your needs.
- A few more large brands that use WordPress are Mashable, Nasa, Mozilla, Coca-Cola, Wall Street Journal, and many more. Meaning that you should consider WordPress as a serious business website solution.
You can build any type of website on top of WordPress, but here is a list of a few, to give you an idea of the possibilities
- Blog
- Informative Business Website
- Online Store (E-commerce)
- Membership Website
- Courses Platform
- Restaurant Website with Reservations
- Hotel Website with a Booking System
- Forum Website
- Multi-lingual website
Summary
As you can see, you can use WordPress in almost any way imaginable, as a personal, business, or E-commerce website. It provides all the tools needed for your online business and makes it a breeze to manage your website.
If your website is not running on WordPress, after reading this, you should definitely consider recording it in it.
Feel free to contact us if you have questions, need a consultation, or need a custom WordPress / Woocommerce website built. We at WebRedone will be more than happy to help.