Myquestions

With the web moving towards user generated content and clients wanting to have bigger say in the look and feel of their site more and more web designers are beginning to move towards designing web applications that can be manipulated by their clients. This Do It Yourself approach has evolved from the traditional web design approach which was much more rigid a client would come up with content and give the designer who would create a design and the html static pages and then upload them, and every time a client wanted to change something this would mean the client would have to contact the designer and change the content. Server side scripting languages like PHP and ASP have resulted in the development of the content management system (CMS) because of this, changing and updating a site has become a much easier task.

A content management system is a web application designed to organize content in an easy and simple way that users can access it. There are a lot of content management systems that are available online and these can be free or licensed some of the best free ones are listed below.

• Joomla (Widely used)
• Wordpress (Best for blogging)
• Drupal (Universal)
• OSCommerce (Online shopping)

Basically a content management system heart lies in the database, nearly all of the website information is stored there and basically the pages act as a skeleton to show the data. You can add extra modules, components, widgets or plug-ins to the site to give it extra functionality to your potential users. These pages can be styled to the user’s needs, so basically the content is separate from the design. This can make it easier for most websites that are run on a CMS to change their look and feel at the drop of the hat. CMS’s also have user friendly administrator back ends where you can change virtually everything about how the site behaves and looks and basically give users privileges and rights. A web designer or developer would basically set up the CMS to the clients specifications and then the client would proceed to run it and update it when they wanted (after getting the necessary training of course).

With a content management system installed this would automatically mean less work for the web designer or developer and more control over the look and feel and site updates for the client leaving everyone happy. The content management system is already a standard for most large commercial websites and very soon a lot of people are going to want to change over their site into one.