Content Management and CMS

A web site is like a garden. You plant a seed, you water it and care for it, and it grows. A web site is much the same, you start out with just a few pages, then you add a few more, then you add a new feature here and there and before you know it, it starts to grow.

With your garden, you must tend to it. You must clear the weeds, and prune your plants to keep them healthy and strong. Your site is just the same, you must tend to it or it will grow wildly, it becomes unmanageable, and eventually becomes obsolete.

Site content is everything that is displayed by your site. This includes text articles, video clips, flash animations, graphics, audio, downloadable materials, etc. All of these pieces of content are considered your site's assets. Managing a site may seem a simple task at first, but you look deeper and you find out that you must also manage links, files, site navigation and link structure.

In the old days, you could hand code a site composed of 5 to 10 pages and keep track of all ascets and links quiet easily. As as the site continues to grow, then it becomes a monumental task. Thankfully today we have at our disposal alternatives to hand coded web pages and sites that make the webmaster's management job easier.

Today, thanks to modern web design techniques and technology, we can have a web site that runs on a Content Management System or CMS.  A CMS is a software program that runs behind the web site scenes sort-of-speak.  It is a software that interacts with a database and delivers content to the site visitors.  A content management system allows us to have an administrative interface where the webmaster can assign user accounts and empower your organization staff to input or edit content directly to the site.

There are several open source content management systems available. Each serve a particular purpuse.  For instance, a shopping cart or online store is a CMS tailored to negotiate online transactions.  Another example are blogs, these are personal journal content management systems.  Yet, other content management systems focus on collaboration.  These type of CMS allow for a number of editors to input content to the website.

Choosing the right CMS is very important.  You want a system that is scalable and will grow with your requirements.  At Tambo.com we are experienced with several open source CMS's and we are sure we can find a good solution for you and your organization.