Manchester Business Resources

Content Management Systems

A Content Management System is a website which is fully or partly editable by the owner of the site. The important criteria is usually that the site owners do not need to be skilled or have knowledge of web design programmes or software and do not need to understand the technicalities of uploading files to a web server. All this is taken care of by the CMS system itself which deals with all the technical aspects of design, linking , page/file creation and uploading files.

This type of system previously have been very expensive with large companies and organisations developing their own bespoke systems allowing multiple authors and editors. Now there are blocks of software appearing in the public domain which do the same thing and allow customisation at much lower costs.

Until recently however, in our view, these systems were still cumbersome and needed a lot of support and training to get the most from them. But they are improving and indeed , this site you are looking at is in fact a CMS system.

The advantages of Content Management Systems are :

• They can be accessed at any time from any place over the Internet. ( They are password protected of course - see the login here to this site )
• They can support a number of authors, editors, contributors and administrators
• They can be of any size, there is no real practical limit to the number of pages that can be created
• The content of the site can be edited by anyone who is reasonable IT literate. Basically if you browse the Internet and use word processing software, then you can edit pages.
• They look professional and are very flexible.

The downside is a higher initial investment as we have to construct the initial site for you, install and configure the database, customise the package to your requirements , train the users and we normally expect a higher frequency of support calls after installation. A guideline figure would be £1500 to £2000.

 Apart from this site , Another example of a client using this system can be seen here.