CMS / Content Management Systems for Not Yet Techies

CMS / Content Management Systems is one of the many new terms created by the Internet. It refers to the need of businesses, both large and small, to have some type of organized approach to their web sites. Large companies such as IBM, Microsoft, About etc have web sites with 1000s of pages. They must all use some kind of CMS / Content Management Systems to keep all pages up to date and properly laid out and organized.

So CMS / Content Management Systems refers to automating as much as possible the process of creating, publishing and updating web pages. Although small businesses do not have the extensive number of web pages that large companies do, they also do not have the same resources to keep their site up to date.

For example, I know that some of the "For Not Yet Techies" articles I wrote several years ago are out of date now. I thought of going through each one and re-researching them, but quickly realized that was madness. With my limited resources, I have no way of keeping up with every little change in test in every single IT certification. I have had companies email me with a request to make corrections, and of course in those cases I happily do so.

So my CMS / Content Management Systems is very UNautomated - I do what I have time to do. Recently I started adding to the series and when I'm finished I plan to provide links from out of date pages to more recent pages. For example, I'll link the original article on Visual InterDev to the article on Visual Studio .NET, the current incarnation.

1. A front end editor

2. Template

3. Back end storage

1. Asset management

2. Transformation

3. Publishing

For instance, I do the research on a topic such as CMS / Content Management Systems. Then I write up this article in Wordpad. I then use a text editor to put standard HTML tags around it, and then transform it into XHTML. Then I cut and paste that content into my template, so that all pages look similar. Then I add them to my site. MS FrontPage helps me keep my site organized.

In an ideal world, I'd have custom made CMS / Content Management Systems software on my own server and employees who'd keep up with every IT term, technology and certification and create new pages and update old ones immediately upon publish knowledge of all changes and additions. While I sat on a tropical beach and gave them orders by cell phone :)

This not being an ideal world, I understand the necessity of an affordable CMS / Content Management Systems solution for all businesses.

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