A website can be viewed in terms of its design and interaction. Design is what you see - graphics, text and how they're arranged on the page. Interaction is how one interacts with the website. This applies to both the end user and the website owner or publisher.

In the beginning

In the early stages of the website, design and interaction were very limited. Design consisted of rudimentary html pages - a few images, links and text. Many websites looked identical to one another. In terms of interaction, the user was limited to passive browsing, while the website owner interacted with his website by using a text editor and an FTP client program.

The evolution

Over the years, there were technological additions such as

• Javascript for altering browser behavior.
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which allowed the styling of a web page to be separated from the html page, and also enabled the designer to centrally control the look of all web pages for a particular website.
• CGI scripts, which allowed the user to fill in online forms, etc.

Opensource software development would also play a central role in the evolution of website technology by commoditizing the server platform (Linux), the web server (Apache), the database (Postgresql, Mysql) and the scripting language (Perl, PHP) -- LAMP. Without these technologies being freed from their corporate shackles, building a website with them would have remained prohibitively expensive.

The ongoing problem

But despite having all these technologies available, designing a website with them was still a prohibitive affair. The reason was that using all of these technolgies required a custom design. In other words, somebody, or a team of people, would have to put all of these technologies together from scratch. Now there is no set way for doing that. In fact, there are as many ways to bring all of these technologies together as there are people and combinations of people to do it. As you can imagine, the process can become easily convoluted, not to mention very expensive.

CMS

With all of these powerful technologies available, it was only a matter of time before developers got the idea to bring them together under one roof. The result is the content management system (CMS), which harnesses these technologies by creating an environment in which they work seamlessly together.

CMS Advantage

A static website consists of web pages arbitrarily put together. To add any kind of functionality to such a website requires customized work (from scratch) which is specific to the designer's experience and ability. On the other hand, the CMS:

• Separates design from functionality
• Centralizes design control
• Provides a graphic interface, very similar to a word processor for changing content
• Provides a graphic interface for adding content to menus
• Provides a graphic interface for adding new functionality
• Allows multiple users to modify content and functionality without overwriting each individual's contributions.

Website environment

So a CMS is really an environment. A place that allows a website owner, with limited knowledge, to peform updates to both content and functionality. This means that for the first time the website owner, not the hired designer, becomes the master of his domain. The webmaster. Of course that may be pushing it a little. The CMS environment can become complex; but as the CMS continues to evolve, that complexity will decrease.

Joomla!

Joomla is an opensource CMS. As such, people from around the world are contributing to its functionality, whether in the form of new extensions or improving the core functionality. Totalnetqc focuses on designing Joomla websites. For instance, the Totalnetqc website is designed using Joomla. Joomla is a vast improvement over the static website. Although the static website maintains a niche in website development, the content management system (CMS) is where the future lies.

Click here to learn more about Joomla!