oswebdesign.co.uk Blog

When should you have a CMS?

A CMS - Content Management System - is very useful when you are planning a website with a lot of dynamic content such as news, case studies, a blog or an online shop. It gives you the freedom to update your content, images, products, prices etc., when necessary and in your own time, without having to rely on your web designer.

In times of free open source CMS programmes such as Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal & Co., more and more websites are built with a CMS. However and especially for smaller static websites where contents is not being updated on a regular basis a CMS is very often unnecessary and can sometimes even be a bad choice.

But how do you know what is suitable for you and your business and whether your website needs a CMS or not?

When you start planning your website try to determine as soon as possible whether or not you will include areas like news, a shop or a blog on your website which need regular updating. If you only plan to update your website once or twice a year, you can consider your website to be a static brochure website and a content management system will not be necessary.

Not only are the costs for the development of a website including a CMS higher and the development takes more time, but also using those open source systems can bring disadvantages as you might have template and layout restrictions.  Data security can be an issue and web pages in a CMS are not as search engine friendly as individually hand coded web pages.

Smaller changes can easily be made by your web designer as and when needed or you can use very basic and minimalistic CMS like Cushy CMS. Your web designer will only need to add a line of code to the web pages and areas you would like to update, and you will be able to make some basic content changes yourself.

This will give you the freedom you need without having the extra costs of a complex CMS back-end, and once your business and website grows and becomes more dynamic, you can still think about adding a custom developed CMS to your beautiful custom made website.