What is a CMS?

Currently many business websites are static "brochureware" sites. This means that they consist of a series of pages (for example Products, Services, About Us etc) usually created with a program called a web editor (e.g. Dreamweaver or Frontpage). Although these tools are quite easy to use, to create a professional looking site most businesses will engage a web design company to create the pages. These pages are then simply copied to a web server and made viewable to the world.

More and more businesses are moving away from static sites and building their sites using web content management systems (CMS). A CMS is a piece of software that runs on a web server and can transform how businesses use the web and open up many new opportunities. CMS's have been around for many years but the cost and complexity have meant they have generally been used only by larger businesses. The new generation of CMS products now mean that any size business can, relatively easily, create fully interactive websites that incorporate advanced functionality that would have cost many thousands of dollars a few years ago. Some of the "out of the box" features included in many CMS's include:

· Easy to update pages – anybody with minimal training can log in and change or add content to the site. Different people can be allowed to update different parts of the site.

· Site navigation and searching are automatically generated.

· Site usage analysis tools show you how your site is being used.

· Forms, surveys, blogs, wikis and forums can easily be set up to create areas of your site where people can interact and communicate.

· Prebuilt or custom site "skins" can be easily applied to the site to instantly create a professional site "look and feel".

· The site can easily be "personalised". Personalisation is a very powerful technique that allows you to display certain content to certain visitors only.

So where does open-source fit in? Open-source is a fascinating concept (that has revolutionised the software industry) where people around the world collaborate to create free software products that anybody can use. These products are in many cases as powerful as alternative proprietary products created by industry giants such as Microsoft or Oracle.

So why would you consider having your site built using an open-source CMS over a proprietary one:

· No licensing costs. Every dollar can be spent customising your site rather than paying the creators of the product.

· One of the big risks of using a proprietary product is "vendor lock-in". This is where a vendor will give a low price to win the work but increase costs afterwards because they know the client can't go elsewhere. This should not happen with open-source because the client can always go elsewhere (assuming they are using a big enough product – see next point) as the vendor does not own or control the product, no single vendor does.

· If you pick an open source product that is sufficiently popular then you are likely to find that a) that numerous companies in NZ and around the world can take over the development at any time, b) there will always be a many people that can provide instant and free help if you have problems, c) the product will improve over time and d) there will be a large number of either low cost commercial or free "add-on" modules that can extend the product and every conceivable way.

This ability to tap into a global market of modules that extend the power of the core CMS is very important for business as it means that they can start with a very simple system and then easily pull in modules at a later date as their requirements evolve.

So if you think that an open-source CMS is an option for your business, some key questions you should ask your web partner:

· Do they have experience with an open-source CMS?

· Is that CMS globally popular (a simple test is to see if there are at least a half a dozen books on Amazon about the product)?

The CMS includes

Search Allow your users to search your site

Breadcrumbs Breadcrumbs provide links back to each previous page that the user navigated through in order to get to the current page, for hierarchical structures usually the parent pages of the current one. Breadcrumbs provide a trail for the user to follow back to the starting/entry point of a website.

Help DNN comes with an extensive help function to assit you in editing your site.

User Management User Management Software to provide membership using simple registration form and web based admin section to manage members.

Page management Edit and rearrange the pages on your site