Is a CMS right for your website?

Our client C.J. Hayden, author of Get Clients Now! and several other books, started Send Girls to School to raise awareness about the importance of educating girls worldwide. The site offers research on the impact girls’ education has, organizations that are working to make a difference, and valuable articles and interviews on the topic.

“I was inspired to start the Send Girls to School Project when I learned that educating girls in the developing world has such a powerful impact.” C.J. says. “The United Nations, World Bank, and UNICEF all agree that a dollar spent on sending a girl to school produces a higher yield to her community than an investment in any other type of foreign aid. I wanted to help spread the word about the incredible value of this simple approach to ending the cycle of poverty in one generation.”

She manages the Send Girls to School site using WordPress as a content management system (CMS). (WordPress is a blogging platform that also adapts well to handling content-heavy websites.)

The theme she’d chosen looked great in Internet Explorer, but had a few display problems in Mozilla Firefox. Since she wanted the site to be fully compatible, she asked us to fix the layout. While we were doing that, she also wanted us to make some changes to the way the navigation displayed and the way the search function worked.

WordPress Makes Design Changes Easy

The wonderful thing about WordPress, or any CMS, is that you can easily change the entire site’s layout by simply changing the master template files. Compare that to a static HTML site, where any layout changes would need to be applied to each page individually and you can see how using a CMS saves a lot of time in the long run.

Make Website Changes on any Computer

A CMS also makes the site easy to update from anywhere in the world–you (or your web developer) don’t need to have access to your website files or to an FTP program.

Do Small Sites Need a CMS?

Popular wisdom dictates that small companies or small sites have no need for a CMS. A CMS is often considered unnecessarily complicated for smaller projects, but the truth is a CMS can be a great way to *uncomplicate* your site.

A CMS makes design changes–whether large or small–simple, and helps you build a site that’s easily expanded as you add more content. CMSes also often make navigation tools (like site search engines and page links) automatic, and allow easy implementation of reader-friendly elements like “Printer Friendly” pages.

Easy Future Expansion

By choosing to build the Send Girls to School site in WordPress, C.J. ensured future updates will be especially easy. From adding new links, to adding new pages, the site will expand as she needs it to.

Setting Up Your CMS

You can hire a programmer to build a custom CMS, or you can elect to do what C.J. did and use an already available program like WordPress. You can also combine the two, using a preexisting open source CMS (a platform a good programmer can customize).

The biggest disadvantage to using a CMS is that it can require specialized knowledge to set up and create the template. This means you need to choose your designer carefully (you’ll want to find someone with plenty of experience with the CMS you’d like to use). It can also mean the initial site will cost a little more initially than a static website might. The time savings and cost savings in the long run usually offset any starting investment, particularly if you like to keep your site up to date (adding new articles, for instance), or if you have a lot of content that you want to keep readily available to visitors.

Installing WordPress

If your host offers Fantastico, and you’re relatively comfortable with FTP programs and installing themes and plug-ins, you may be able to install WordPress yourself. If your host doesn’t offer Fantastico (usually in your site’s control panel), installing WordPress is more complicated (and, unless you’re comfortable with MySQL, PHP, and the rest of the alphabet soup, I don’t recommend attempting it on your own).

(Shameless self-promotion alert. ) Not the do-it-yourself type when it comes to programming? We’d be happy to help. Here’s what C.J. had to say about working with us specifically:

“Jessica and her team do a fabulous job and are easy to work with. She understood exactly what I needed right away. The changes I needed to the site got done quickly and without a lot of back-and-forth. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Jessica for anyone who wants to launch or upgrade a WordPress site or blog.”

If you’d like us to do a fabulous job for you, too, get in touch! But, first, make sure you check out the Send Girls to School site so you can see how you, too, can get involved supporting girls’ education internationally.