Content Management Systems, Your Website, and You

My schedule this week includes three meetings with clients who are having brand new custom websites built. This is exciting: it's like having a house built for you, though of course far less expensive. As copywriter, my conversations with these clients and their designers begin with decisions about what pages they need, what kind of navigation will work best for them, their goals, and the user journey they expect for their clients.

One of the particular questions that inevitably arises is this: will they need a content management system? A content management system, or CMS, is a way for clients to make changes to their websites directly, without going through their webmasters. For example, if you have a blog here at Blogger, you can change it whenever you want. Depending what skills you have, you might need help to make it look the way you want, but you have full access to it.

So in one meeting, with the staff of a church, we were discussing the options for the pages they want for their programs. The youth minister said, "We'll be wanting to change our page all the time." The children's program director said, "Can we put announcements for the parents up? Maybe as PDF files to download?" The pastor said, "There'll be training for how to do this without screwing it up, right?"

The two developers I work with most have exactly opposite positions on whether a CMS is a good idea or not. As I've been meeting with and planning for this week's clients, I've been thinking a lot about their respective arguments, and I've reached a conclusion.

They're both right.

Fargo web designer Joe Sandin believes that a CMS is generally a good idea. Here are his reasons:

• You save money in the long run. If your developer spends four hours building a CMS into your website, and it keeps you from paying him or her to make changes for fours hours every month, then your CMS will pay for itself in the first month you're online. Do the math; this is a strong argument.
• You have greater control. I work with a lot of webmasters on behalf of various clients, and I can attest to the fact that it can be very arduous to get changes made. Kevin, who has served as webmaster for two of my clients, once took six months to make an address change. That's six months during which a brick and mortar store had the wrong address on its website while I begged Kevin to make the change. (He lives in another state; if he'd have been local I'd have dropped by his office with cake and refused to leave till it was changed.) When you do the math here, you should consider the cost of having customers go to the former place of business instead of to the new shop.
• Dynamic content is good. Without concerns about access and cost, you may freshen up your website more often. Search engines will visit you, your customers will drop by to see what's new, and you can even end up with more pages indexed.
  

Pretty well persuaded that you should have a CMS on your website? Fayetteville web designer Shan Pesaru has equally good counterarguments.

• DIY can be expensive. We've worked with plenty of clients who've had a secretary spending an entire morning getting more and more frustrated as she tried to do a website update that would take a professional ten minutes. Whatever you're paying your staff, there's no way that can be a cost-effective move compared with hiring it done.
• You have greater responsibility. Along with the control that allows you to make changes you want, you may also end up with control that allows you to make changes you don't want. Accidentally removing your header, introducing punctuation errors into your nice optimized copy, or making lots of little changes that add up to spoil the proportions of your design can affect your SEO even if you don't mind the effect.
• Stress is not good. CMS can make life difficult. You have to train any member of the staff who will be using it, you have to find time to do it -- a news page that you start with high hopes and good intentions looks pitiful when it's months out of date -- and chances are good that it won't look the way you wanted it to. After all, if you were a web expert, you wouldn't be in the business you're in, right? Small businesses are often better off having a professional take care of their website so they can concentrate on what they do best.

As I say, I have after careful thought decided that I agree with both Joe and Shan. Here are some things to consider for your own site:

• Think about the future implications. I reminded the church staff that the website might outlast them. If one of them is promoted or changes jobs, do they expect their successors to have to have the same level of technical skill they have? If your business is just starting up and you expect to have plenty of time for upkeep of your own website, are you sure you'll have the same flexibility a few months from now?
• Consider some compromises. I have access to my own website -- within reason. There are parts of the code which are in red, which means, "Rebecca, don't touch this." This is comfortable for me, though it might be stressful or excessively tempting for others. We also do some sites with integrated blogs, so the clients can play all they want with that section without worrying about inadvertently causing themselves problems in the rest of their pages.
• Think about your resources. Is your webmaster responsive about changes or a pain to work with? If Kevin were my webmaster, I'd want full access, fond of him though I am. If your business has no tech-savvy employees, or no workers with any downtime, a CMS wouldn't be a good plan for you.
  
• Get that training. Some clients feel as though being able to handle Facebook means you can handle your own website. Others are afraid to go into the admin section for fear of causing their computers to explode. Get enough training that you are comfortable doing all the things you need to be able to do to make effective use of your CMS, if you decide to have one.
  

For the church, I recommended a compromise: an integrated blog which everyone can add to, training to use it, and the option of calling me when I'm needed. Shan came up with a way to do this at no extra cost, and everyone's happy.

Your website might be better off with a CMS and a professional to use it for you. You might want full service, or you might want full access. Consider all the factors before making your decision, and you'll be happy, too.