A static website, as the name implies, is one that does not change often – other than the occasional update, the website stays the same over time and no new content is added. Should new content be required, a web developer would need to add it.
CMS stands for content management system. A CMS is used to manage the content of a website. If a site is updated frequently and if people other than web developers need to update the content of a website, a CMS is used. Today, many sites are built on a CMS, which can also allow content of a website to be updated from any location in the world by signing into an online management interface for the CMS.
There are three types of CMS you can choose from:
• Bespoke: This is a CMS that is built specifically for a certain website, and many web-development companies build their own CMS that they use for their clients. This option is highly tailored and customised to your website, and can be more expensive than other options. It is also possibly less flexible.
• Off the shelf:A CMS can also be pre-built by an external company or developer. These can be bought like any other software on the market. While this may have fewer custom features, it’s potentially a more cost-effective option than a bespoke CMS.
• Open source: There are many open source, pre-built CMS options available, some of which are free. Open source means that anyone can see the code that the CMS is built with, and can manipulate or improve it (and share this with everyone else using the CMS). An open-source CMS can be more rudimentary than paid options, but is also easy to tailor to your needs, and there is often a community that can create the solutions you need.
Some widely used open-source CMS solutions include:
• WordPress (www.wordpress.com)
• Joomla (www.joomla.org)
• Drupal (www.drupal.com)
A CMS should be selected with the goals and functions of the website in mind. A CMS needs to be able to scale along with the website and business that it supports, and not the other way round!
Of course, the CMS selected should result in a website that is search engine friendly.
Here are some key features to look out for when selecting or building a CMS:
• Meta and title tag customisation:the CMS should allow you to enter your own meta tags for each page, as well as allow full customisation of title tags for each page.
• URLs:instead of using dynamic parameters, the CMS should allow for clean URLs by using server-side rewriting. Clean URLs consist only of the path to a webpage without extra code (a clean URL could look like
this: http://example.com/cats, while an unclean URL could look like
this: http://example.com/index.php?page=cats). It should allow for the creation of URLs that are:
o static
o rewritable
o keyword rich
Be careful when building clean, descriptive and dynamic URLs from CMS content. Should you use a news heading (‘Storm’, in this example) as part of your URL (http://www.site.com/cape/storm) and someone changes the heading to ‘Tornado’ (http://www.site.com/cape/tornado), this will alter the URL and the search engines will index this as a new page, but with the same content as the URL which had the old heading. Bear this in mind before adding dynamic parameters to your URLs.
• Customisable navigation: a good CMS will allow flexibility when it comes to creating the information architecture for a website. For the purposes of adding additional content for search engines, a CMS should not require that all content pages be linked to from the home page navigation. This allows content to be added for search engine optimisation (SEO) purposes, without adding it to the main navigation.
• The CMS needs to have good supportfor managing SEO considerations such as URL rewriting and avoiding duplicate content issues.
• Customisable image naming and alt tags for images:a good CMS will allow you to create custom alt tags and title attributes.
• Robots.txt management: ensure that you are able to customise the robots.txt to your needs, or that this can at least be managed using the meta tags.
Finally, using a CMS that supports standards-compliant HTML and CSS is very important, as without it, inconsistencies may be rendered across various browsers. It also ensures faster loading time and reduced bandwidth, makes mark-up easier to maintain, supports SEO efforts and ensures that every visitor to a website, no matter what browser they are using, will be able to see everything on the website.
