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The Benefits of a Content Management System Vs. Static Website
More and more, these days, people are realizing that for their websites, what they need are Content Management Systems and the old static websites are not meeting their needs. There are many reasons for this. One reason being that the search engines like fresh recently published up to date content. Another reason is the flexibility and the maintainability of these websites.
In the past, all websites were what we would call static sites. The web designer would create a layout with links to all the pages so that the visitors could navigate to all the pages in the site. The site content never really changed and that is why the name “static” is used. Once the site is published, in the case of a static website, it does not change until a new pages are published or existing pages are edited and re-published.
These are contrasted with Content Management Systems, or dynamic database driven websites, as they are called. Take the example of the blog or weblog as an example of a dynamic website, that is technically a Content Management System also. When you come to a blog, the first thing you see is the most recent article followed by any comments and then the next most recent article. This is all driven by software and a database.
A Content Management System can be even more versatile than a blog. It can incorporate basic pages, a blog, a forum, a photo gallery, e-commerce (a shopping cart, for example) and much more. The clients only need a web browser to maintain the site and no advanced web design, html or other coding skills are required. Content Management Systems make it very easy to incorporate these and other Web 2.0 features into a website.
Summary of Benefits
- Makes it possible for the client to update, maintain website
- Updates and changes to the website do not require skills in HTML or other Web Coding
- Many Extensions are available to incorporate various Web 2.0 features
- Flexibility
- New and "Fresh content helps with ranking in the search engines.
Two very popular and open source (think free) Content Management Systems are Drupal and Joomla!
