Jeepers! Web Sites are confusing, hopefully you'll find these short explanations a useful guide figuring out what you're after.

What Is It?

To break it down, a Content Management System (CMS) is software devoted to the 'frontend' of a site (the bits you and your users see and interact with) and making it as simple to maintain as possible.

Virtually every site you use will utilise CMS' at some point. Amazon will use one to manage products on their online store. Online newspaper editors will use them to keep the freshest news at the top of the page. You might use one in Facebook if you ever log in to tag your friends in photos.

CMS' are various and bountiful and can cover a broad spectrum of a organisations needs, but ultimately they're just here to make technical tasks simple.

Why Have It?

Every site needs changes to it eventually. Some need to change the copyright date at the foot of a page, others need to replace every Winter photo in the catalogue to a Summer shot.

In fact as CMS' are virtually unavoidable in most online environments, the question is what makes a good CMS. Ideally you want it to scale appropriately, so only features relevant to the organisation's needs are included. Where possible it should be simple to use too, certain tasks may call for some initial guidance but nothing more taxing than some precursory practice should be required.

What's An Example

Hatters Promotional Merchandise were satisfied with the look and layout of their existing catalogue-style web site but became frustrated they couldn't easily customise parts of the site how they wanted.

TMS Web Design's re-build took advantage of CMS functions by allowing staff to quickly add, remove and reorder what products appeared in the What's Hot section, the main front page focus, making it easy to promote offers or respond efficiently market changes.

The re-build also allowed nearly any information on the site, whether in a Press Release or in one of the business' 100s of products, to be edited or changed allowing for constantly up-to-date content for their customers. As per request the CMS capabilities are intuitive to use and simple to learn.

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