The Bad Thing About a CMS - Ziller Web Marketing Blog

These days, many websites have a Content Management System or otherwise know as a CMS, which allows a user with no real web design experience to be able to update the content and make other changes to the web site, that usually would require someone with web design experience to do. For many online businesses this is absolutely crucial, and in fact you will not find many shopping carts out there that don’t have either a custom CMS solution or a standard one that came with the cart.

Once you have your shopping cart up and running, to have to constantly pay web designers to update the web site or hire a experienced employee with web design experience can be very costly, and its for this very reason CMS’s are so popular, they save operating costs and allow you more flexibility to be able to update your site.

So now to the point about my post. From my description above you could easily conclude that there are no down sides to a CMS yeah? I mean what could be possibly bad about them, they give you options to regularly update your site that you would not otherwise have, and ultimately save you money. However from my experience in designing these shopping carts with a CMS, there has been a problem that I have noticed over time, which I am not that all happy about.

You spend countless hours designing this great shopping cart. You put a lot of time into thought about the design, how things should look, and in the end have a beautiful looking web site that will be perfect for your portfolio, and most importantly converts users in buying and make the client money. Then you deliver the website to the user, and that is where the problem starts.

Once the client knows how to use the CMS, in most cases they will have the ability to make a multitude of changes, including changes to the homepage, and other content pages. When the client does make these changes, I have found on many occasions that they wreck the site! They will do things like put absolutely stupid images in a prime position, use text with the wrong font, and generally do things that no one with web design or internet marketing experience would do. Unless you have an ongoing contract with the client and perform regular work for them, you really have no control over this.

While it may sound like I am complaining, (which I am) it just annoys me to see a great website ruined because you give the client the ability to manage the site themselves. What I would recommend to anyone one who does run a online website and has a CMS, is to make sure that changes yourself or your employees make, are inline with the designer and or internet marketers ideas and are going to effectively improve your website, not ruin it!

Tags: cms, content management system