A beginner's guide to content management

• Jonathan Crossfield
• 5 August 2009
• Page 1 of 2 : single page

Great! You've got your new website up. Time to sit back and wait for the phone to ring, right? But wait - that competitor's website has way more pages than yours does.

In fact, it has new pages added almost every day, getting indexed in Google and attracting a lot more traffic. Then there's that other one that manages to automatically update all the product information and stock availability, creating a better customer experience. And the one that invites customers to leave comments and feedback, including them in building reputation.

How do they do it?

And then it happens. Something needs changing across your entire site: a price, a logo, perhaps a name. Suddenly, days are lost as you manually go into every website file and repetitively type in and correct the new information - or worse, pay someone by the hour to do it for you. Surely there's a simpler and quicker way?

Today's perfect content may be out of date tomorrow. Even something as seemingly minor as updating your business telephone number can become a nightmare as you try to locate every outdated mention in every file and manually edit them before uploading. And then there is the possibility that some mentions are missed or forgotten - especially if you have a large or complex site. It isn't a professional look when a potential customer calls a long out-of-date contact number only to hear a disconnection message.

Let's have a look at some of the prime reasons you need to be thinking about content management.

Easy administration

Too many business owners spend hours updating their website manually every time a customer buys something. How many products do you have? One? Ten? Five hundred? It can begin to overtake more important areas of your business when you find yourself frantically trying to type ‘out of stock' onto the relevant pages before anyone else tries to submit an order. And then there are price changes, new stock listings, images to be added.

Online stores require constant administration, which is why most use a content management system (CMS) designed specifically for the purpose. This backend system allows you to log into a private administration area and make changes simply and easily that are automatically reflected across the entire site.

Your website should ideally function as an additional member of staff, serving customers, processing orders, sending confirmation emails, producing reports and electronically restocking your shelves without constant supervision. This automation can be the difference between a website that drains your resources and one that grows your bottom line.

Online stores aren't the only websites that benefit from using a CMS. All sites that require regular content updates - blogs, news sites or any site more than a few pages - can either benefit from, or can't survive without, a CMS.

Yet there is an even stronger reason for small business owners to consider using a CMS, even with a small site requiring few updates over time: ease of use.

Most small business owners are not online tech whizzes or budding website designers. Most of you reading this would not consider editing the website files yourselves - and wouldn't know where to start with all that code. Even relatively minor changes can become expensive when outsourced, and larger changes to design or content can result in larger bills.

When paying for someone to design and build your website, wouldn't it make more sense to take delivery of something you can then administer yourself without incurring additional costs? Using a CMS is your guarantee that, should your website need changes or additions, you can handle the work, by yourself, in minutes.

How does content management work?

Instead of creating and saving the same information continually throughout your website, a CMS allows you to write it once and have the website work out how to include that content whenever it is needed.

A CMS displays web pages by selecting the relevant elements and piecing them together in the right configuration. For example, if the top of every page is going to feature the same business logo, menu items and contact details, you shouldn't need to repeat this information in each page file. Instead, the information that forms this part of the page would be stored in a single, separate file and each page file would contain an instruction to include this information at the right spot.

Each page is therefore assembled in the web browser like a jigsaw; header from that file, footer from over there, images from there, copy from there - and so on. You only ever need to write each of these files into the CMS once and they appear wherever in the site they are required.

There are many benefits of working like this.

Your website takes up less space and requires less data by reducing repetition.

Should an element need to be changed, you only need to edit one file. Change a productprice in the right place and, once saved and published, the entire site reflects the change instantaneously.

New pages can be created very quickly as many of the elements already exist. Only the fresh elements, such as specific content or images, need to be created.

Each of the elements required to build the website is stored in a database, housed on the server. Like any database, this is merely a structured collection of information, organised for easy access by the CMS. Databases can be created on the server for most hosting accounts and are merely a way of storing all this information in pieces, ready to be called up and assembled.

A CMS allows you to create and control these pieces, invisibly converting your words and images into code and storing them in the database.

Finding the time to produce content

If you've decided to include blogs, articles or other regularly updated fresh content, you may find time becomes your enemy. Sure, a CMS makes these tasks quicker, but someone still needs to write and produce all this extra content. You have a business to run - when will you find the time on a regular basis?

You shouldn't attempt to produce hundreds of pages overnight. Many websites have languished unfinished and unseen because the person behind it never finishes the sheer amount of content planned. Even the biggest websites started small and grew over time to achieve such a large number of pages. They didn't wait for all this content to be finished before launching - instead working steadily over the weeks and months, growing in increments.

Ideally, put aside a couple of hours each week to write content. This is usually enough time to produce a strong blog post or a couple of useful pages of copy. Choose a time when you aren't required elsewhere - for example, when your family regularly watches those television programs you hate - so you can keep to this timetable without it impacting elsewhere. Over a year, that's at least 52 new pages of strong content.