In today’s digital world, websites are your virtual calling cards. How you approach your website design says a lot to customers, prospective clients and visitors about your business. You therefore owe it to the business and to your customers to make it less tedious for your web designer to manage and maintain the website.
The solution: Content Management Systems (CMS)
The Value of CMS to Web Site Design
Content management (CM) is a vital part of any website. Because content is what drives traffic and promotes the site, it deserves a lot of care and attention. While your web designer is likely a highly skilled professional, his/her time and expertise is often limited by the tools they have at their disposal. A CM solution can go a long way to bridge that gap.
Contrary to what you might think, CMS’s aren’t just about “managing” website content. They do a lot more to help with website designing and management too. That’s because they integrate so closely with other solutions used – such as development and coding tools – to enhance the value proposition to the website.
Here are six value adding features that most CMS tools offer a web designer:
1. The Template approach: CMS helps you use templates to create new pages. So, if you or someone from your sales or marketing team needs to add new content pages, they can do it themselves - no need to bother the web design team.
In fact, CMS Templates can be used to give your website a whole new look – with very little support from your web design agency. It’s only when you are making structural changes to the website that you’ll need to bring in the experts.
2. Collaborative approach: CMS fosters the collaborative approach to content creation. Instead of licensing other web site building tools, CMS has features that allow groups of team members to work on website content simultaneously.
Instead of calling on your web design services team whenever you want to create new content, you can have your in-house experts collaborate to produce it. And guess what? No programming or coding skills needed!
3. Work flow: Unlike static web site designing tools, CMS helps you to create web design work flow streams for your content. You can define a content creation, review, editorial and approval process so you implement quality control and oversight in your creation and deployment process.
With a good CMS tool in place, even advanced design changes, like changing backgrounds, images and fonts, are a breeze. You won’t have to pay your web designing agency to make such changes. It’s a website owner’s DIY dream come true!
4. Security: If you are up to date with your CMS subscription, you’ll always be up to date on the latest security patches. These tools automatically search the internet for all applicable security updates, and apply them to your website.
Having CMS take care of your website security patches and updates means you and your website designer will have more time to spend on what matters: Selling your products and services!
5. Upgrades: Most CMS solution providers offer new changes to their solutions with the license. You get new and better features each time they are developed and released to all other users.
With each upgrade comes more flexibility and greater opportunity for website owners to create, maintain, publish and manage web content. Using newly released upgrades also means your web design service provider will always have access to cutting-edge tools – the very same technology used by your other competitors.
6. Data Analytics: Most tools come with data analytics engines that allow you and your website design team to monitor and analyze the impact on your website from the content you publish. You don't need to license separate tools or use 3rd party (Google Analytics) software.
Using the embedded data analytics, if you notice specific content drawing more visitors than the rest of the site, you could easily create additional web pages with “more of the same”. You won’t need to tap the expertise of your web designing services professionals to do that!
The right CMS solution for your web designing needs
Before choosing a CMS tool, it’s important to conduct a needs analysis. And based on that analysis, you decide what features and functionality meet your specific needs. Armed with that information, you can work with your web designer to shop for the right CMS tool.
The CMS marketplace is filled with highly effective solutions. But not all of them might be ideal for your needs. To make the best of a CMS tool, you need to consult with your website designing agency first, before making a purchase. Your agency will not only help you select the right solution for your needs and your budget, but they could also advise your inhouse website design team during implementation.
