Content Management Systems are becoming all the rage. Everyone I come across believes they should have one to run their website and I agree completely. The problem is there are so many different ones available from free to bespoke tools and they all offer completely different solutions and functionality.
I typically opt for Joomla, WordPress or an Opensource Ecommerce solution, but each to there own. This morning I was working with a client on Umbraco, an ASP.net solution. Fairly straight forward but not as straight forward regards the SEO aspect of a website. Which very often is not even in the bounds of most CMS tools. generating page titles generally is based on the Page name and doesn’t allow for the creation of focused keyword rich page titles.
The client had mentioned how it was difficult to use and it taking ages to create pages and get them looking correct. On further investigation it’s not down to the toolset but more the way the site has been built. In this instance the majority of issues relate to badly created stylesheets preventing content from displaying correctly on the public side of the website. An evenings work to identify the parts of the stylesheets that need to change for the developer to adjust.
Coming back to a CMS system, I’m reminded that it’s great to have one but in reality how many of you actually make changes at regular intervals to a website. We all think it’s great to use a CMS system as it gives us the flexibility to actually create content, yet most of use never do it. Add to this the fact that most of us are not developers and remembering how to do things and add additional styles means we can never fully utilise the flexible areas of CMS to make our sites look great.
Returning to my client this morning the site also showed areas of badly created code, where blocks were not closed off properly meaning that online styles needed to be inserted to pages to get them to behave properly. To a degree this means the need to have a technical expert assist with building pages as the supposedly simple CMS toolset now requires a GEEK to add pages and make them look great.
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