Okay, so what is a CMS, and why is it important for you to have one, as a business owner?
Once upon a time, and even still today, sites were basically hand coded by people, and whenever you wanted to make changes, you'd contact your developer and get them to change the site.
The issue with this is, you have to wait for the developer to schedule it in, then they need to deploy it out, then you'd need to check it.
At some point, though, frameworks began popping up to help people get a hold on this better. Enter the Content Management System (CMS).
Mange content yourself, without a developer
Content Management Systems can differ in what they do, and the way they're set up will determine their effectiveness.
The CMS essentially is like an app portal that you can log into, where you'll see pages sorted nicely, settings and all the tools you have to add, edit, and delete different types of content.
Let's say you had to change something in the footer of your site. Then you would go to the relevant section in your content management system and make the edit. Then you'd hit save, and save yourself a call with a developer.
It goes further than that, though. What if you needed to add a new service page, or a news article, or add a user who could log in to help manage stuff. Well, that's the entire purpose of having a Content Management System.
As complex as you need it
A CMS can be as simple as a place you log in to write a blog post, add a video, or enter some new course material for your students.
But a CMS can also expand way beyond that to handle advanced use cases, like a real estate portal, or somewhere for a user to manage their home insurance. Or maybe a product showcase with a learning center and content gated downloads.
So the bottom line is, you're essentially empowering a team of people by giving them a content management system to power your marketing machine.
A Content Management System for collaboration
Okay, imagine there's more than one of you who needs to manage the content on your site. Wouldn't it be good if you could keep track of what's being edited, make comments and suggestions, before hitting the publish button?
That's the benefit of having a content management system. It can go even further than that, too. How about scheduling the publishing of content, or having a workflow setup for a team of different editors, or even having notifications go out when things are published or need to be looked at? Yep, that's another benefit.
Some will allow you to translate all the content on your site, letting you reach even more people.
Choosing the right CMS
There are so many Content Management Systems on the market right now, and that number just keeps growing, so how do you go about choosing the right CMS?
If you plan to just write a blog, then you could check out WordPress, which was designed with blogging in mind, and is great for that purpose.
But if you need more than a blog, then we would recommend Sanity which we use to build all of our sites.
Sanity, is considered a “composable” content management system, or “headless”. Don't let this term throw you off, though, you'll hear it a lot.
This basically means the content is designed to go wherever you want it, your site doesn't live on the CMS, instead, you basically pull only the data you need to whatever platform you want to push it to.
Imagine you need a web app, a desktop app, a website, a watch app, or some other kind of medium, maybe even an e-commerce store hosted somewhere else. What if you had another website and wanted to pull in some of the content? This kind of CMS lets all of these things tap into it, so your content is no longer chained to your website.
Not only that, but it's really fast too.
If you're interested in a really, really fast website, with content management built in, then check out our plans, we'll even write your content for you.