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Content Management Systems (CMS)
Welcome to our new WordPress Blog. We’ve been having more requests for CMS driven web sites, so I wanted to develop my own and use it as an example of how they work and how I would suggest using them in web sites.
Two of the other most popular CMS systems are Joomla and Drupal, but WordPress is more specifically geared for blogging so it’s the CMS of choice for that type of functionality.
WordPress is a CMS, meaning that theoretically someone who owns a WordPress site can log in to their own online control panel and make updates to the web site themselves. For many clients this sounds like the magic bullet which will allow them to go in and do virtually anything to their own web site without having to know anything about how web sites work, and this is not at all the case.
For one thing, if they think a CMS would allow them to redesign the look of their web pages by simply moving graphic elements around, changing colors, or adding images to the header, they will quickly discover that this is not possible unless they know quite a bit about WordPress, PHP, CSS, and HTML programming.
Design Issues with CMS
The proponents of using CMS will try to convince you that custom design is not an issue or a problem, but I would have to disagree with that assertion on some levels. When you first set up a CMS system on your web server these come with default “themes” for you to choose from, which means you’re choosing a design for your web site that someone else has already programmed to work with that particular CMS. Sounds easy right? Your site is already designed for free (or sometimes for a price depending on which of these you choose from), and all you have to do is slam in your own content.
The problem with that thinking is, every individual company is entirely unique and different from every other company and you’ll never be able to find a template that looks exactly the way you want it to look. It might be close and it might even look great the way someone else has designed it, but the minute you insert your own branding (placing your logo in the upper left corner for example), you’ll find that it doesn’t match your own personal look the way you would have liked.
Because this pre-designed template has already been hard coded for that particular CMS, that’s what you’re stuck with and there is very little you can do with it without getting into a major programming overhaul. In the case of this WordPress blog, I programmed my own template and that’s why it matches the look of my other site pages.
So Why Not Just Use CMS for Everything?
At least in my case this raises the question “Why wouldn’t you just use WordPress for your whole web site?” The answer to that is, I could. Once the main template is designed and programmed for WordPress, the entire blog lives in a database. WordPress loads the template I designed according to my graphic layout and how I set up the copy and links to look in html and css, and all of the individual pages are loaded dynamically from a database. There are plenty of good arguments for doing it that way, but the main problem is this only gives your site one layout option. If you want more flexibility than that a CMS simply won’t allow it.
Say for example you want extensive custom formatting on your home page, but then you want different formatting on your main landing pages, and then from there you want different formatting on the third tier pages which link from these main landing pages. You may want the header to be customized for each landing page for each major section of the site for example, or you may want to go from a three column format on the landing pages to a two column format on the third tier pages. This is the kind of thing that makes a web site a nicer visual experience and easier to navigate, but with a CMS you’re stuck with one layout option and I just find that way too limiting.
So the suggestion I always make is if you really need a CMS in the first place, think about where you need that functionality and also think about where you may want more flexibilility for other unique layout options. I’ve set my site up exactly this way so that my main site pages, (Home, Web Design, Multimedia, etc.) are not part of the WordPress blog.
So if you click from my home page to the blog link for example, you’re going from a regular html/css web page programmed in Dreamweaver (where I have complete control over unique layout options) into another directory which contains the WordPress application. So I’m using the WordPress directory as a portal for my blog and keeping it separate from the rest of my site where I want more control. This makes sense to me keeping these two things separated like this since the blog is intended to serve its own unique purposes (you can’t beat WordPress for blogging), and my other pages are free to serve other specialized purposes (using unique custom layouts for different types of content).
Dreamweaver is also a CMS
Some might argue that their site would no longer be fully CMS at that point if some of it is developed with Dreamweaver, but I always ask why anyone would think that Dreamweaver itself is not a wonderful CMS in its own right? In my opinion Dreamweaver is the best CMS out there. It’s the industry standard web development software of choice, and you would probably be needing it for making file modifications and uploading these files to your web server whether you use another type of CMS or not. Dreamweaver may require somewhat of a learning curve, but so will a CMS, and neither of these options will ever rescue you from having to know a thing or two about html if you plan on managing your own web site.
Another thing anyone with a web site will need at a minimum is image editing software (unless you don’t plan on having any images in your web site), and Photoshop is bar none the tool of choice for that. If you’ve purchased the full version of Adobe CS4 or CS5 you will already own Dreamweaver and Photoshop since they both ship as part of that package.
well, well, well… looking and sounding good. How long did it take you to write/compose this? I haven’t had a chance to navigate around on the rest of your blog links but just wanted to reply while I was still awake. That’s an engaging headline ‘Dreamweaver is also a CMS’.
It will be interesting how many responses and hits you receive. Let me know how it goes. I know that I should also do one but my god, when do you find the time? I have to take some computer ‘down time’ so I’m going down as I type. talk to you later…
It’s not so much the time it takes to write articles. I spend far more time with writing emails to clients which might only be read once by one person.
With WordPress the time comes in with getting unique things to work which are so straight forward on regular web pages. I set up some Flash AS3 examples and one embedded video example in the blog, and with WordPress those features are not handled the way you normally would on regular web pages. You have to search for a plug in, install it, read the documentation, etc.. Once you get one of those working it’s easier to generate new pages based on a given plug in, but every time you encounter a new requirement for different types of content it seems to send you off on a new programming adventure.
That brings up another good point about why it’s good to keep a CMS like WordPress separated from the rest of your site. You have more control over which topics you want to open up for blogging and it’s easier to keep all of that self contained.
Thanx for the effort, keep up the Great work. I am going to start a small Blog Engine course work using your site. I hope you enjoy blogging with the popular BlogEngine.net. The thoughts you express are really awesome. Hope you will write some more posts.
Best of luck on your blog! Most of mine will be geared towards current projects I’m working on along with occasional rants like this about web design issues. I’ll be posting more as time permits.
Nice article! It was a pleasure to read it
I am interested in building my own webpage but I am totally green to website design. The comments that you have supplied here is great. Does anybody know of any good sites where I can get even more information on making sites.
I wonder how this is relevant to everything…
You may be onto something there. No matter what we do in life, a good rule of thumb is to pay attention to universal laws and principles. This is especially important with web development.
I just read your article at http://jdlstudio.com/wordpress – just saying hi, thanks for the blog post.
Great post, I admire the writing style
A little off topic here but what theme are you using? Looks pretty cool.
Thank you for your reply. I used the original Kubrik theme as a starting point and then redesigned it to match my own site template.
Kubrik has been the default theme for WordPress since 2005, so I was sure it had their seal of approval and it had all of the functionality I needed.
Another variation on the Kubrik theme is called the K2 theme. The developers of that one claim it has more versatile functionality built in and it’s also supposed to be far more user friendly than the original Kubrik. I haven’t played with that one yet but I plan to the next time I do one of these.
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I just tested this on IE8, IE7, and IE6 and it’s working in all three so I’m not sure what you’re seeing. If you’re using IE6 or below there is no guarantee that anything will work that well anymore.
Even Microsoft stopped supporting IE6 long ago, and they tell you to “Update your Browser to a more recent version.”
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First off I would like to say awesome blog! I had a quick question that I’d like to ask if you don’t mind. I was interested to know how you center yourself and clear your head before writing. I’ve had a hard time clearing my mind in getting my ideas out. I truly do take pleasure in writing but it just seems like the first 10 to 15 minutes tend to be wasted simply just trying to figure out how to begin. Any recommendations or hints? Cheers!
That’s a good question and I’m not always entirely sure how this happens, but I think it has to do with being compelled to say something when there is a direct need or when you’re inspired for some reason.
I had been thinking there were a lot of misconceptions floating around about CMS for quite a while, so by the time I sat down to write this it just came out without much effort. If I had tried to do this as an assignment without giving it much thought beforehand however, I’m not sure how easy that would have been.
Sometimes it takes a while for ideas to crystallize in your mind, and it always seems to happen when you aren’t focusing on it too much.
Hey great site!! And great Info! I could learn a thing or two from you!!
Fantastic, i’ve been looking for this for hours. Does this work on wp 3.0?
It’s based on the Kubric theme which has been the WordPress default since 2005, so I’m assuming it would be compatible with older or newer versions.
The admin panel tells me whenever there is a more recent version of WordPress available, and I always update to the newer versions whenever they come out.
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