What is a Content Management System (CMS)?...

A content management systems, or CMS, is a great way to manage the content of your website, especially if you have a larger website and different people who are responsible for different parts of the website.

If you have a large website with many “static” website pages and you’re tired of waiting for your IT staff or webmaster to make changes to the website, a content management system will put you in the driver’s seat and make it easy for you

Advantages:

- Administration system for updating content without the need for HTML
- Easy to change look and feel using a few templates
- Database is used to manage text content
- Non-technical staff can create, edit, approve and approve website pages
- Control over approval of changes
- Ability to deliver different content to public and registered users

Three CMS examples

There are many different content management systems available, some of which are free, open-source applications such as Joomla! and many commercial systems such as Interspire’s Website Publisher. Depending on your website requirements, Design-First will recommend the best CMS solution.

Joomla!

Joomla has emerged in the last few years as one the most popular open-source CMS applications. Joomla! uses PHP and mySQL and is extremely versatile. It is more than simply popular-it just works well and a volunteer community keeps making it better and better.

Because it is open source, there are thousands of “extensions” or small mini-components created by individual programmers and commercial software companies, which work within the Joomla! framework to give your website many different capabilities-from social networking to ecommerce and more.

Joomal features include:

- Search by keyword and advanced search capability
- Registration system for users with different menus for different groups
- Users can be assigned editing and publishing privileges
- Entirely web-based administration system
- Uses PHP and mySQL
- Open source code
- Over 3,000 extensions to provide many exciting website features

Interspire Website Publisher

While Website Publisher may not be considered as versatile as Joomla! in terms of available extensions, it is a robust, mature, well-supported CMS product with many great built-in features.

Website Publisher Features:

- Search by keyword and advanced search capability
- Users can be assigned editing and publishing privileges
- Entirely web-based administration system
- Uses PHP and mySQL
- Search engine optimized
- Article, news and blog sytem
- Many built-in templates

WordPress

WordPress is a content management system focused around blogging. Like Joomla!, it is open-source and it supports a “plugin” framework, allowing websites using WordPress to have different capabilities, based on different website requirements.

WordPress Features:

- Search by keyword and advanced search capability
- Easy to use web-based administration system
- Uses PHP and mySQL
- Search engine optimized
- Hundreds of available plugins
- Open source code
- Thousands of templates

What Content Management System is right for your website?

This depends on your business needs or website goals for the most part and how quickly you need your website up and running.

If you are building an informational website that you plan to expand into a portal or community website, Joomla! will be a better choice. Joomla! would be overkill for a simple blog website.

For many businesses, Interspire’s Website Publisher is a great choice for managing hundreds or even thousands of pages, and has blogging capability built in.

WordPress is the Best CMS for SEO purpose...

In this article, you will understand that why WordPress is the only CMS you should use if you need an extra edge over your competitors for Search Engine visibility.

A user who has experience of various Content Management Systems (CMS) for the past several years can easily say that it is both tedious and frustrating if a CMS is not user-friendly in terms of Search Engine Optimization-SEO aspects. For example, some software requires an additional plug-in before you can configure the Meta tags or the URL structure. This is very troublesome especially for those people who are in the business of creating new websites every week.

The first advantage of WordPress  is it already has a built-in option that allows you to configure the web page URL structure. The permalinks option in WordPress enables you to configure the URL structure so that the URL becomes Search Engine friendly. One very good example is to use the blog post name in the URL as it will help Search Engines to allocate high relevancy to the specific page. You can easily change this setting under the Permalinks, settings option in the WordPress dashboard.

The second advantage for using WordPress is its amazing loading speed because of its excellent performance. If you are already user of an existing CMS, you will agree that WordPress is the most compact CMS currently. All websites powered by WordPress loads very fast especially if the images are further optimized as well on the pages. Take Joomla for example, it takes nearly three times longer to load than WordPress sites. Remember that the loading speed of the website is pretty important especially if you are using the site in your Google Adwords campaign because Google considers web page loading speed as one of the advertisement Quality Score.

The third reason why WordPress is so well received by Search Engine Optimizers is because there are very popular SEO plug in that can easily enhance the effect of optimization overall. One of the popular plug-in that many people are using is the ‘All in One SEO Pack’. This plug-in alone is able to help you to achieve optimal results in just matter of seconds. No other CMS has a plug-in for SEO that is so easy to use and almost maintenance free.

There are people who have more than 10 websites and most of sites are powered by WordPress. Nowadays choosing a right CMS for SEO purpose is very important especially if you want to have more time to do your marketing instead of the technical issues.

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