The Complete Guide to Content Management Systems

January 10, 2009

Content Management Systems are used to create, manage and publish web content, empowering business users to directly manage their content without technical assistance and automating the process for review and publishing of web content. The best content management solution for your web site is one that will generate a measurable return almost immediately by lowering operating costs and increasing profit.

A CMS may support the following features:

1.  identification of all key users and their content management roles;
2.   the ability to assign roles and responsibilities to different content categories or types;
3.    definition of workflow tasks for collaborative creation, often coupled with event messaging so that content managers are alerted to changes in content
4.    the ability to track and manage multiple versions of a single instance of content;
5.    the ability to capture content
6.    the ability to publish the content to a repository to support access to the content
7.    separation of content’s semantic layer from its layout

One approach can be to use Content Management services, enabling you to add/change content on your site using your web browser. With this method there can be an initial setup cost, but you can make your own changes without the need to go back to your site designers. Check out a number of options listed in the Google Directory in the Content Management category.

Content Management System is not just related to articles. Take into consideration other aspects like e-mails, search engines, customer feedbacks, RSS feeds, and so on. Content is not limited to just articles or blogs there is much more to it like RSS feeds, e-mails, feedbacks, etc. So if you want your content to be always looking fresh and attractive use CMS of good quality taking care of analytics and reporting systems.

Content management systems have become much easier to use over the past year, and consequently many businesses are quickly employing them in order to speed up development time and reduce development costs. Content management system facilitates the management of internal corporate documentation and information, web site content, and group collaboration.