Web content management systems (WCMS)

One of the most important issues relating to your website is managing the content you have created. The more content and the wider variety and types of content, the more it requires continual refreshing; and the more people you allow to edit your content, the more difficult this can become.

Web Content Management Systems (WCMSs) are tools developed specifically for this purpose.

A WCMS is a database that stores content items of any type and presents them via HTML web pages (see building a website). It works in conjunction with style sheets that determine the formatting and presentation of your web pages to present your content as you want it to look.

The advantages of using a WCMS include:

• The separation of your content from HTML code. This means that staff in your organisation with no web development experience can create, edit, update and contribute to your content.
• The separation of your content from your style sheets, so you can change the formatting and presentation (e.g. colours, fonts and layouts) of your website without touching your content.
• The ability to provide limited access rights to your content, which means that you can allow staff to access and edit content relevant to their own particular area of responsibility but not touch other content items.
• You can provide links to a single content item on several pages which means that when that item is updated, the changes are carried across the site.

An important aspect of using a WCMS is to ensure that there is adequate protection of your data to prevent unauthorised manipulation of your content.

There are many WCMS solutions available. Many of these are provided subject to ongoing license fees. It addition, there are often costs involved in set-up, training and ongoing support for the solution. It is worth finding out what the likely ongoing costs are before committing to a specific solution.

It is also possible to have a custom-built WCMS developed for your own particular needs. However, this is usually an expensive undertaking and is rarely required unless you have particularly sophisticated requirements. It is prudent to obtain advice and quotes from multiple suppliers before committing to a custom development.

Choosing a WCMS

Some of the key questions to consider when choosing a WCMS are:

• Does it support multiple contributors but allow you to control the specific areas of content individuals can access?
• Does it support entirely customisable style sheets and templates and conform to your design requirements, with no restrictions on layouts?
• Does it support all the content types that you could conceivably use?
• Does it support social media?
• What kind of training is necessary and available for your staff who might contribute to your content?
• What kind of support is available?

There are also technical considerations that you may need to confirm with your website developers and/or hosting service provider to ensure it will operate according to your requirements, such as:

• What database/s does it support?
• What technical platform does it use? Is your website developer familiar with the technical architecture?
• What server infrastructure is required for it to run reliably?

WCMS products also vary according to the size of an organisation’s web presence. Large-scale enterprise WCMS solutions can support multiple websites and multiple internal intranets. This degree of complexity (or cost) is rarely required for small-to-medium-size or community organisations.