A CMS (Content Management System) is software that allows you and your team to update your own website in-house.

By logging into a secure area of the CMS, you can create, edit, remove and move pages around your site to suit your Marketing activities.

The CMS is generally installed on your server and can be accessed online from a PC, laptop or even mobile phone.

Changes you make to your site in the ‘back-end’ are then published to the ‘front-end’ of your site and visible to the public.

If you have a web site, you’ve probably been outsourcing the maintenance to a design or development company?

By using a CMS, you can move a lot of that maintenance in-house and start to publish content yourself. However, it’s important to note that a CMS will allow you to maintain ‘content’ but it’s not a design tool. It’s likely that you will still need to use a web designer for any design or visual elements of your site.

No. If you already have a web site, you can usually have the CMS running on top of your existing hosting package. If you don’t yet have a web site, most modern hosting packages are more than capable of running a good CMS.

No. As the CMS is web-based, any PC or Mac with a web connection and a modern browser should be absolutely fine.

No. The best ones are simple to use and with minimal training, you can start updating your site right away.

You won’t need to learn a programming language or require any technical knowledge. But we won’t leave you stranded with a new technology. Full training is provided as part of the service and we’re available to help with any issues you might have.

You bet! Actually, there are hundreds and they all work in different ways. If you’re considering using a CMS for your web site, we can advise you on which Content Management Systems suits you best. There are literally hundreds of Content Management Systems available today. They all have various strengths and weaknesses and all handle content management differently. At EdenWeb, we only work with CMS that are easy to use, intuitive and scalable.

Briefly, the steps involved would be (varies according to the CMS being used) 1. Browse to your CMS control panel and login 2. Locate the page or text you wish to edit 3. Edit the content through the in-built Rich text editor (RTE) 4. Hit ‘Publish’ or ‘Save Draft’ and you’re done! If you’ve used a text editor such as Microsoft Word in the past, you’ll be familiar with the process of updating content and formatting it via a CMS. The RTE contains a series of formatting buttons such as Bold, Italic, Bulleted List, etc that can be applied to your content.

Thankfully not! Didn’t we say it was nice to use? :-)

WordPress is primarily a blogging platform. In my opinion, while WordPress can be developed into a CMS, it requires a lot of third party add-ons. I believe there are better options out there for a business wishing to add and edit content themselves.

Every designer has the favourite system(s) but the best CMS for you is the one that’s most easy to use, requires no specialist technical knowledge and most closely matches your business requirements.

The key to a successful CMS deployment is to start evaluating your company requirements first and to work outwards from there.

Absolutely. I’d strongly advise any organisation thinking of adopting a CMS to ask their web company for a demo or some kind of walk-through before they commit. Try before you buy. Ask if you can see how it works, how to add, edit and remove content and see the steps involved. They should be very straightforward.

Speak to your web team about the following.

• Licensing
• CMS upgrades and security
• Backup costs and schedules
• Rebuild or maintenance costs