By Sarah Reed
Nowadays, most websites are built using a content management system, but not all. Content management systems are wonderfully convenient in that they allow a person who has no HTML knowledge to be able to make edits to their website easily and properly. Of course there are times when the system does not work perfectly, as I discussed last week, but for the most part, having your website in a content management system will not only save you time in making the edits yourself, but will also save you money if you are hiring a developer to make the edits for you.
If a site is not hosted in a content management system, in order to make edits, an FTP program (such as Fetch, CuteFTP or Dreamweaver) must be used. It takes a lot of additional time making edits through an FTP program rather than a content management system. To make edits via an FTP program, you have to:
- Open this program
- Download all of the files from your website (which can sometimes take 5-10 minutes depending on the file), open them
- Find the part that you want to edit
- Find where any images might exist that you want to use
- Make the edits
- Upload the edited files
On top of this process, edits do not always look the same when you make them in an FTP program as they do once they have been uploaded to a site, so very often tweaks need to be made, and the whole process must be repeated several times to finish the page updates.
If the same website was hosted in a content management system, the editing process would be much for efficient. To edit website in a content management system all you need to do is:
- Log into the cms
- Go to the page via the directory of pages
- Make the edits and click “update”
This is a far simpler process even for those who know HTML code. Some CMS systems even allow you to save previous page versions.
If you are looking to build a new website, make sure to inquire about having it built in a content management system. It will save you time and money whether you are doing it yourself of hiring someone else to do it for you.
