Content management (CMS) sites Vs. Blog style sites Vs. Static websites
One of the questions we are asked a lot is: What sort of platform should I build my site on? Forgetting all the fancy things, there are three major ways of producing a site for a small to medium sized businesses or organisations: Static or brochure sites, blog style sites, and CMS type sites
Static sites
Firstly we can produce a static site or “brochure site”. A static site has pages that are fixed and unchanging. If you want to change something, you need to contact the designer who will alter the site for you. Static sites are very suitable for companies that have information that never changes very much. Where price updates are done every few years, or for presenting long term factual information
Static sites are not dynamic, they dont really interact with the user, thry presrnt information, and that is it. There is nothing wrong with a static site, infact static sites are a very good platform for a small business, and even on larger sites, can work very well. An example of a static site we have produced is www.journeyafrica.co.uk
The Journey Africa website is a good example of a larger static site, and even though the site owners can not update pages themselves> Just because we cal the site a static site, doesnt mean the content is not intersting or dynamic. The individual pages themselves can have dynamic content – look at one of the hotel pages for example: http://www.journeyafrica.co.uk/one-and-only-hotel-cape-town.html. On this page there is a slider containing nested content, a slideshow of images that is user reactive, a form feeding back page specific info to the site owner etc. On the rest of the site you will find liknks to on the fly currency conversion, video streaming, and other DHTML slideshows and image scrollers
Blog style sites
This site is a blog style site. The framework is provided by generic blog software, and the design and template was done in house. The advantage of this style of site for a small to medium sized business is that information can be added, subtracted, amended very quickly. We chose this format to cope with the way we present portfolios. Essentially each portfolio is a new page, which we can add when ever we want
You will notice a few differences between this site and your average blog. We don’t have calendars. Articles are not dated and don’t display an author name. There is no facility to add comments. In essence, all the standard blog features have been programatically removed, leaving behind the same features that you find on a static site, that is – menu’s, and pages of information
We provide a lot of these blog based sites for small businesses, especially businesses who want to invest the time in continuously adding content to their websites
Blog style sites are quite limited in the way they present information, and don’t do some things very well. This is why for example on the www.caronphotography.co.uk website; we integrated a blog into a static site and added a separate gallery system. The customer uses the blog in the traditional sense, the rest of the site deals with the customers other requirements
If you want to keep amending your sites information, and the information you want to present is very simple, a blog style site has a lot of advantages for you
Content management systems (CMS)
Content management systems suit companies and organisations which have a lot of content to present and organise. You can add, remove, and even time content. You can have multiple authors, and a person who supervises or moderates the addition of content
A content management framework can deal with other activities, like e-commerce, galleries, forums, blogs, polls, questionnaires etc. We used a content management system on the www.lencarta.com site. The site in this instance streams video’s, offers downloads, and sells products. The staff at Lencarta keep the content fresh and up to date themselves
The major advantage over a blog style site is scalability and extensibility. A CMS system can scale up from a few pages to being absolutely enormous, with thousands of pages, managing thousands of users, and offering a plethora of functionalities that can be easily added and removed as required
One advantage of a CMS is the separation of structure, content, and design. In other words, you can re-design the site in a year or two, and the structure and content remain the same. You can easily re-structure existing content, or just amend existing content. The power of adjusting the template, while everything else remains constant can not be underestimated. Example – Christmas sales – you can re-brand your whole site, for Christmas, or the summer holidays, just by switching templates
CMS sites are not exclusively for larger businesses, they are for business and organisations that want that extra organisational layer, or require the additional features that the basic blog system does not offer
Conclusion
If you want a site that presents fairly unchanging information, and you have no desire to update content yourself – a static site is probrably your best bet. If you have content that needs to be added to on a week by week basis, and you are happy to add the content yourself, using a simple editor, then a blog based site is possibly the best option for you. If you have a organisation that is spread out, with lots of content, or you need a site to expand with yoru business as it grows, or you are looking for a fluid reactive site that is scalable, then a content managment (CMS) type of website will be your best option
About the Author
Richard King has been producing websites for over 15 years, and will be delighted to discuss your business needs with you. We do not have a one size fits all approach. For a no-obligation, free consultation and chat, just call Richard on 0115 845 8953 The least he can do is make sure you are on the right track
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