Web Design & Marketing Blog

What Are The Benefits Of A Content Management System For Web Designers?

Category: Blog

Written by Estevan Montoya

So you don't have money to pay for a custom website? What about after the website is up and you need to make changes? Do you know HTML? Maybe a little...What about CSS? How about PHP and working with SQL? I am probably talking a foreign language to you right now. Top that off with the fact that many people want a website that they can add blogs posts to, upload new images, and interact with social media. With this great need, we found programmers and designers that started making their own CMS, Content Management Systems. They have become relatively easy to use over the years. Now a person can have an affordable website without needing to know code.

So what exactly is a Content Management System?

A web content management system (WCMS) is a software system that provides website authoring, collaboration, and administration tools designed to allow users with little knowledge of web programming languages or markup languages to create and manage website content with relative ease. A robust WCMS provides the foundation for collaboration, offering users the ability to manage documents and output for multiple author editing and participation.  Read More...

There you have it, Wikipedia states that one can have very little knowledge or web programming languages and manage websites with ease. This has created an ability for average people to have a website. Someone might think that such a system would take away from website designers. That is true is a web designer is not willing to move forward with intenet innovation. Websites are becoming larger and larger due to the advent of the blog and social media. For that reason ALONE, a web designer  should consider a CMS. I'd hate the be the one assigned to making sure all the links worked if I didn't have a CMS.

Rather, a web designer can take advantage of this shift in the internet and can offer two solutions to helping people get an affordable website that one doesn't need a DR. degree to operate:

First,they can offer serivces to install and host such website (Like LEXY, our affordable website package)

This has become a major shift for website designers. They are not only designing the websites, but they are now hosting them. This is exactly what we at VivaNet2.0 offer. That is why we can offer such affordable websites. We host the sites, install the sites, and offer customer support for our clients....all for a small monthly fee when compared to a client needing to get their own hosting, pay someone to set up the hosting, pay a website designer to create a website, and then pay them to make changes.

They can use their creative skills to make templates

This is where highly talented designers and programmers can take advantage. People are constantly looking for great looking website themes/templates. A designer can sell them for a particular CMS or just offer them exclusively to their paid clients. I have seen web designers take both routes. I know a church website designer that offers about 5 templates, each having multiple styles. His templates are made in a CMS that he developed. To have his site, you must be his client. Then I have seen another web design company create templates for a popular CMS. He makes one new template about once a month and charges a yearly fee to access all of them.