I have been asked many of times, ‘what is the benefit of a cms?’..oh, sorry, for those of you who might not know what a CMS is, it’s a content management system that, in short, allows you to run/edit your website from an online admin section rather than hard coding every single page of your site and using an ftp client, or host manager account to edit pages, download and reupload again.

Ok, lets first cover why we shouldn’t use static html pages anymore….when designing a web site using static html pages, you are losing a lot of time and money editing and creating just a single page. Think about it, first, we have to login to a host manager, download the file, bring it into an editor, edit the content; hope to god we made no mistakes cause we wouldn’t want to have to spend even more time trying to debug where we want wrong on the page. So anyhow, we have to edit, save, then, upload again to the server. What a pain in the arse, not to mention impractical.
There is too much room for error when working with static html pages, and its tedious work, all for no reason. Which leads me to my next chunk of blah blah.

Using a CMS allows you to simply, painlessly and most important, quickly, add, edit and remove pages. One template is designed. Not one for every page if we were doing html. So, we make our template, we upload those files, now, we go to our admin.

Oh see the light shine, heaven has opened its gates.

Many cms applications have these wonderful things they call add-ons, these can be anything from a fancy way to scroll your latest news items, to more glamorized galleries, blogs, commenting systems, and the list gos on and on.

Unlike static html pages, say we want to add a new link to our menu, but man, we have like 30 static pages, ok, well this is going to suck, now we have to add a new link to every page..or do a find and replace if we have that ability. OK, so, 10 minutes later, we are done, now we have to save all and upload all..man this is becoming tedious and painful..i think I am late for dinner.

Now, lets go add a menu item to our cms, ok, logging into the admin..adding new item to my menu, saving..WOW, look at that!!! I am done, and the new menu item is applied to every page on my site…what did that take us….like 10 seconds? Man, at this rate, I might have time to actually chew my food.

A CMS is a dynamic system, meaning, in lamest terms, you type your content into a box, using a wysiwyg editor and the application takes that info, stores it into a database, and publishes that content on the front end.
You can control the structure of your content, main categories, sub categories, and you don't have to worry about having all of those folders and files on your server.

Too many times, we have had contracts that involve populating with content without the content.
What I mean is, we are done the rest of the job, and waiting on the client for the copy.

I have seen 3 to 7 days pass waiting to get copy from a client to get the job completed on time,
and many times waiting so long, that the completion date has past and needs to be rescheduled,as mentioned in our contract.
When I job is taken on by Verve Development, the project is put into a schedule, and worked in and out to fit smoothly in with other projects as not to overload our developers.

It's just like cooking a fine meal

The elements of a website; would you leave out the eggs when making cookies?

It is important to add all of the ingredients to a recipe in order for the end result to come out how it should, the same goes for making a website. It is important to have all of your elements, i.e. navigation, FAQ sections, Contact elements, ecommerce processing in place.
Too often I have had clients all wrapped up in the ‘pretty’ of their site and not the functionality, lots of images, pretty flashy scrollers, but it takes you a few minutes just to figure out where the navigation is, or where the heck you are on the site.

As some one that is deeply involved in all aspects of internet business development, I always marveled at the great importance many clients put on the actual design of a site. The level of weight given ranges from incoherent and misguided to down right anal retentive. This normally wouldn’t be much more than an ongoing ‘twitch’ for me considering the 1000’s of clients throughout the various industries spanning my 20 year interment in the business world. Thing was, I recently finished an article for my site called, “Internet business success; avoiding failure” which was based on an interview with the President of Verve. I now wondered what role this new little nugget plays in website demise.