Introduction

Depending on how you look at it, we live in an evolving world. Technological evolution occurs at breakneck speed, especially when it comes to computers. The technology that allows us to control and interact with websites is no exception.

History - the static website

Before the CMS website came along, you had the static website. The static website has been around since the inception of the world wide web (WWW) in 1991. It consists of web pages arbitrarily put together. These pages are located on a server in the same state as you'd view them with your client browser. To update these pages, you'd have to update a local copy of your website. This means opening the html page and sifting through the code until you find the content that you wanted to update. On Windows, you would have done this with:

1. A text editor such as Notepad (very unfriendly)
2. An html editor such as Homesite (a bit more friendly but still requiring you to sift through code)
3. An html authoring tool such as Dreamweaver (the friendliest but definitely overkill for just updating content

Note that Homesite and Dreamweaver are programs that you would have to purchase for a non-trivial sum of money.

Warning: You need to know a minimum of html code so as to distinguish between it and the content. Otherwise, there's a chance that you may alter or delete the html code which will result in distorting your web page.

Once you've updated the content locally, then you'd have to upload it via an FTP client program.

Now this static website update operation may not sound too difficult, but believe me, in all the years I've been building websites, not one customer has opted to do the updating on their own. When it comes to websites, the vast majority of people don't want to deal with the hassle.

CMS - easy as working with a word processor

CMS is the next step in the evolution of websites. It stands for Content Management System, which is a website that allows you to directly manage the content - both text and images. In other words, you would go to your website, login with your username and password, and start making changes to your content. Instead of working with a text editor, the CMS provides you with an interface that is very similar to a word processor. That's it. You save the changes you've made, and they're immediately reflected on the website.

Website environment

A content management system consists of much more than a word processor interface. It's a website environment that allows you to control how the information is presented. It can also manage multiple users contributing to your website content, providing different access rights for different users. 

Business oriented

Like any dynamic business, a business website is undergoing constant change. This not only applies to the content and images, but the functionality of the website. A CMS provides an environment for integrating that new functionality, whether it be:

• a rotating gallery of images
• banners
• calendars
• a shopping cart
• newsfeeds
• etc...

To integrate functionality into a static website, it has to be done in a customized fashion, whereas with a CMS environment, many functionalities already exist as pre-made extensions that can be integrated via the system's graphic user interface itself.

Conclusion

The time will come when most if not all websites will be built with a CMS. The CMS has just too many advantages over the old static web site.

Click next to read about Joomla, probably the best CMS around.