Pretty much every website out on the internet today will have some kind of CMS behind it.
What is a CMS? I hear you cry. Well a CMS, or Content Management System, is the part of the website that you can log into to manage the content on the website. All of the text, images, products etc that your website users see, is all added, edited and deleted from a CMS.
You can have websites without a CMS behind them but to updating the website usually then requires a good working knowledge of code to be able to change the content of the website. A good CMS will usually remove this layer of knowledge, making it easy for even non-tech savvy users to update their website.
So what makes a good CMS?
A good system will remove the need for any technical knowledge on the users side. Editing the content of a page should be as straightforward as typing a document in Word. Having this level of ease will make users comfortable updating their site without fear of it breaking what customers see, and as a result will make them want to keep the site up to date with the knock on effect of the SEO benefits that regular updates bring.
At Digital Nachos we have worked with many CMS systems. Some are ok to use. Others are truly terrible.
We’ve used systems where adding a new page meant creating a page, then editing the site menu to include the new page, then having to apply that menu to every other page on the menu. Phew! That was a lot of steps for a simple task. And with more steps there runs the risk of mistakes happening.
Other systems we have used were so limited that we couldn’t achieve even the most simple of online marketing tasks such as editing the meta information for a page, probably the first task for any online marketing work.
Most recently we were trying to add a button to a website header and the CMS would not let the user do that without delving into the code. These systems are supposed to be user friendly so anyone can create the website of their dreams, but they just aren’t.
So how do we get around these issues?
We have looked long and hard at the various solutions on offer, some popular systems and some most people haven’t even heard of, and weighed up the pros and cons.
What solution did we come up with?
Build a bespoke CMS for our clients. We have developed a custom CMS that we use on all of our websites. When designing it we took all the best bits of the existing systems and made them a bit better, and left out all of the awkward parts.
As a result adding a page is as easy as clicking a button that says ‘Add Page’, type in the text you want to appear and press ‘Save’. The page will appear in the menu if you tick the box, the text and pictures is just like a Word document, and there is no chance of accidentally moving the menu to the bottom of the page.
A nice side effect to our CMS being bespoke is that we can add in any features you might want from your website seamlessly. For example if you wanted a custom quote calculator for customers to use, or you wanted to work with us to develop a bespoke CRM then we could easily bolt the two together to integrate.
If you dread having to update your website, or your CMS frustrates you no end when trying to do something that should be simple, then get in touch with Digital Nachos today and see how we can make those easy jobs a little bit easier.
No one should be wasting their time with inadequate CMSs, yourself and your business deserves better than that.
Published: 4th Oct 2019