Content Management
Systems 101
Part One: CMS: How Web Design Has Evolved

Website development today ranges from full custom—usually with heavy Flash elements—to hosting-company commodity (think GoDaddy or 1 & 1’s website builder). Somewhere in the middle is the world of content management systems – CMS for short. A CMS gives you the simplicity of template design with the option of full customization.

Let’s take a look at the evolution of websites. Traditional website development involved creating page layouts using heavy-hitting programs Dreamweaver or Visual Studio to construct the website one page at a time. The designer created a series of styles that govern how text and images are displayed, and the tools generated the associated HTML or ASP files. An HTML programmer then took that information and stitched it together so a server can display the individual pages as a fully realized website.

Hosting companies, seeing an opportunity to get more business by lowering the cost of building a website, hired designers and HTML programmers to come up with tools to automatically stitch the site together. They then built a series of templates that included all the style information with background colors and icons. These systems then became part of the hosting company’s offering, allowing anyone to build their own website. It was a less expensive solution, but over time, websites started looking the same because the same templates were used.

Companies like Microsoft seized the chance to take their document management solutions, like SharePoint, and turn them into website content engines. A design team would develop the look and feel of the website, but all the content would be populated from common office applications like Word and Excel. This meant that anyone would be able to update a press release or company policy on the website. It was a great model, but one usually reserved for large corporations.

Somewhere between the hosting company template and the large corporation website using SharePoint a solution was needed. In came the CMS builders, who created Joomla, Drupal, NotNetNuke, Wordpres, and more. Many CMSs are independent and open source (i.e., free or cheap), but others are commercial and supported by development organizations.

Read part two of our CMS series, CMS: Not for content only, in the next issue of Wax Paper.

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