It’s me again, Uncle Arthur! Today we need to talk about Content Management Systems (CMS). CMS has made websites easy to design and easy to use - even for novices and non-techies. It had to happen. Blogs caught on essentially because anyone on the internet can go to WordPress or Blogger and set up a free blog. You can choose a free template from either one of these CMS blogging platforms. This is the same reason that all the other CMS platforms like MySpace caught on.

Many people now want a larger, more flexible website design, BUT they still want the ease of CMS. Why not? Mambo and Joomla both offer flexible CMS systems and you can use templates to save time and money in designing for either Mambo or Joomla platforms. You must provide your own hosting, but that is a small price to pay for a larger, well-functioning CMS website ( $6-10 per month ).

You might say - “Is that the end of work for designers?” No, designers will still be able to use the newest technologies and most original variations possible for a webpage. That kind of design work will always be found near the cutting edge, but it will be much more expensive than a CMS webpage using a customized template for originality.

Most people want a good-looking and functional website. They do not necessarily want all the bells and whistles, some of which are difficult to use or maintain anyway. Packaging is great but the CMS systems are doing a very adequate job for 90% of the websites needed out there. Sometimes a website can be more about content than packaging. And a lot of people don’t have $600-$5000 for a design, nor do they have the money for hiring a webmaster upload photos or texts to their website.

When a designer creates a website he will use every dollar of your budget, and you will still be dependant on that designer to make changes or answer questions. Not so with CMS systems. So get an inexpensive CMS website with a low cost, easily customized template. The best collection of templates for Joomla are found here - and for Mambo here.

And when you are quickly loading your content, or making changes on your own, remember that Uncle Arthur got you on the right foot.

“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire . . . ”
Arthur Browning