CMS – Content Management Software

If all this talk of coding and designing scares you off, youmight want to know that there is an alternative to all this. Youcan install a kind of software called a Content ManagementSystem (CMS) that allows you to put content up on the webwithout ever knowing a thing about HTML.

Now in its 8th Edition, the acclaimed CMS Report provides acomprehensive overview of Web Content Management products andbest practices, including updated, 5- to 12-page comparativesurveys of 31 Web CMS packages (26 in the Standard Edition), aswell as short descriptions of 15 other products across 7 vendorcategories.

The report is ideal for companies looking to develop abusiness-driven Content Management strategy, or who areconsidering selecting a CMS product and need unbiased technicalassessments, or who simply need a clearly-written guide to thisconfusing, fast-changing landscape. Further details can beenfound here: http://www.cmswatch.com/CMS/Report/

Fantastico

Depending on your host, you might find that you already have aselection of CMSes available and ready to install from yourcPanel. Log in, and take a look for the Fantastico scriptinstaller. If you have it, then you’ll be able to read adescription of each piece of software you have available to you- try out a few of the CMSes to see which ones you like.

Finding a CMS

If you don’t have Fantastico on your host, or you don’t likewhat it offers you, don’t worry: there’s plenty of choice outthere on the web when it comes to CMS software.

For finding free CMS software, a truly excellent resource iswww.opensourcecms.com. At that site, you can use the menu at theside of the page to see lots of open source CMSes running beforeyou commit to downloading them and installing them yourself.Textpattern, Drupal and Plone are very popular right now, sothey’re a good place to start.

If you’re considering commercial CMSes as well, then you shouldtake a look at www.cmsmatrix.org, which provides an up-to-datecomparison of almost every CMS out there. Be prepared, though,that commercial CMSes can be ridiculously expensive orunnecessarily expensive.

Getting a Custom CMS Built

If nothing out there seems to meet your needs, you mightconsider having a web designer build you a custom CMS in ascripting language like Perl or PHP. Any web designer worththeir salt should have something basic already that they canbuild whatever features you want onto. This can be really goodwhen it comes to making your website work the way you want,since the CMS will be built around your website to make it aseasy as possible for you to modify.

Using a CMS

The whole point of a CMS is to make it much easier to addcontent to your website and to edit the content that’s alreadythere. Once you’ve installed your CMS, you will generally beable to log into its user system using a special admin password.This will add ‘edit’ options to the existing pages of the site,as well as giving you a ‘new page’ link somewhere to allow youto create a new page.

When it comes to actually writing the content of the pages, mostCMSes will make it easy for you to copy and paste from programslike Word: they shouldn’t require any special HTML formatting.Some will require you to mark words with special symbols if youwant them to be bold or italic, but it shouldn’t be tootroublesome.

Changing the design with a CMS usually involves installing atemplate into a template folder and then selecting it in theoptions. Creating your own templates can be complicated,depending on what software you’re using, but it shouldn’t be anytrouble for a web designer, and most template sites will providedesigns in a format suitable for this kind of use

Finding a Hosted CMS

Once you know which CMS you want, an alternative to installingit on a web host that doesn’t necessarily support it is to do asearch and find a host that specifically supports your CMS. Youshouldn’t have too much trouble finding a host somewhere thatwill support you – if nothing else, you might tryopensourcehost.com, which supports almost every open source CMSout there.

Using a host solution might be a little more expensive, but itwill save you a lot of time in configuration and a lot ofproblems if anything goes wrong. Using a hosted CMS is one ofthe quickest ways to set up a website: you simply pay the host,log in, add your content and you’re away.

About the author:

Original Source: Articles-Galore.com

Information supplied and written by Lee Asher of The Home Income Portal

Home of Serious Online Business Options.