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RISING WOMEN EXPERT
ADVICE...
I’ve hired a design firm to build my company a website, and they
asked whether I wanted a static site, or a CMS. What is the difference, and
which should I pick?
The answer to this question depends a lot on your company, and what you
plan to do with your site. A static site can save you some money, but this
comes with a few drawbacks.
CMS stands for Content Management System. It’s used in virtually every large
website - commercial or personal. It uses databases, usually MySQL, to store
content on your page, and then dynamically serves the pages to your viewers.
A good CMS will have a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor, which
makes editing content a snap. The interface for editing content will
generally look a bit like Microsoft Word, with font formatting and image
insertion buttons to make the process as easy as possible for the end user.
A static site, on the other hand, relies purely on hand-coding for all of
the text, formatting options, and image handling, which makes page changes
challenging for the average user.
If you aren’t going to be editing your site very often, and don’t have many
pages, a static site should be able to save you a few hundred dollars from
your design bill, but keep in mind that any changes you will require down
the road will require someone with xHTML/CSS knowledge to safely edit them,
and chances are they will charge by the hour for these edits.
If you plan on selling anything on your website, a CMS is strongly
recommended. As you’ll already be using a database to store your products,
it is much easier to implement those products into a CMS than a static site.
A CMS also allows the end user to make content changes on the fly, easily
and safely. If you are going to be changing and adding new content to your
page, or selling anything online, I would suggest using a CMS such as Joomla!
or Drupal to handle your content.
Good luck!
For more great advice on website development, contact Alicia Lucyszyn of
Citrus Marketing Group at 403.863.6739 or visit
www.citrusmarketinggroup.com
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