3 Ways to Manage Your Website Content

There are 3 common kinds of systems website owners use to manage the content on their sites. Some are more powerful and more flexible, but also require more effort to setup and maintain. Which system is right for you depends on what kind of web site you need.

  1. Manually upload HTML files. This is the simplest, and the most limited way to manage your website content.
  2. Use blog software. This lets you publish large amounts of up-to-date content, and it provides some powerful ways to organize your content and market your website to users.
  3. Use a content-management system. With a CMS, your website can blow you away. Add in some custom programming, and you can do almost anything you can imagine.

There is a disadvantage to all this power, however. It’s like the difference between riding a bicycle, driving a car, and flying an airplane. A plane will get you a lot farther, a lot faster, but there’s a lot more that can go wrong. If you want cheap and reliable, and if a bike will get you where you want to go, then that’s the way to go. There’s also some overlap between the three. If I needed to get from New York to Tampa Bay, I could fly or I could drive. Flying will get me there much faster, but it’ll be more expensive, and you’ll have to deal with the TSA to boot. Which means of transportation you choose depends on the particular trip you want to take.

It’s the same way with these three ways of managing your web content. Each level overlaps into the others:

  • Some businesses have extensive on-line article archives, which they publish using hand-coded HTML. Usually, you’d use a CMS to manage a collection of documents this large.
  • I’ve even seen people provide Web 2.0 features like RSS feeds using hand-coded RSS! I’m just glad I don’t have to do that.
  • And some users use their blog software as a CMS. They install plug-ins up the wazoo, even tweak the software with custom programming.
  • Still others install a CMS just to put up a simple, 5-page website. They could have used manual HTML. But they chose the automated software, because they want the flexibility to rearrange it, extend it, or change the look and feel of it easily.

So there are no hard and fast rules. You have to use your own judgement to determine where you want to go and how fast you want to get there.

Mini-sites: As Easy as Riding a Bike

The simplest kind of site is a mini-site, a small, laser-focused site, usually with only a few pages. These are a great way to advertise a niche product or service. Or to promote a special offer or event. You can manage a mini-site manually, using HTML templates. That’s because a well-designed mini-site usually has only one main page, perhaps with a few variations. Everything on the site has only one purpose, to ask the visitor to make a decision whether to take the next step in a relationship with your company. Note that this is not how most companies organize their websites.

Most companies—and most web designers—do it wrong. Because they organize the website to highlight your company, rather than organizing it around the customer. The truth is: No one cares about you. They only care about what you can do for them. And they want to know this now! That’s why the landing page is the most important page, and the customer is the most important person in an effective website design.

Remember the goal a website is supposed to accomplish? It converts visitors into customers, and customers into visitors. In order to accomplish this, a mini-site must look and feel very different than what you are used to.

Jim Edwards is the mini-site expert. And he has a free audio and e-book about mini-sites. Compare Jim Edwards’s mini-site designs to how most small business websites are designed. The difference is that his actually make money. His free audio and e-book explains the 3 purposes of any mini-site, the 4 types of mini-sites, the biggest mistake people make with mini-sites, and more. Listen to it or read it, because this information is key to making a small website work.

Anything more elaborate than a mini-site, though, and you’ll proably want more than raw HTML. You’ll want the computer to manage your content. Because what’s difficult with manual web pages is not HTML itself. The hard part is combining content with presentation and managing links between pages.

In fact, even with some mini-sites, if they’re more than a few pages, you’ll want to use an automated system. For example, let’s say you have a few dozen articles, free reports, and white papers on your product or service. This can be consistent with the purpose of a mini-site. To publish all these documents on your website, you’ll want to list them in categories, maybe even in several different indexes, on several different web pages. You’ll also want to add new articles and case studies from time to time. Managing all this data becomes so much easier when you can leverage the power of the computer to do all the grunt work.

Blogs: The Keys to Your New Car

One way to let the computer manage content is using blog software. This software lets you publish articles, day by day as in a news feed. Users can then subscribe to your site’s feed, and as you write new articles, your website automatically notifies each subscriber. Additionally, any articles you’ve already written remain on the site for as long as you want, organized by whatever categories you specify.

The most popular blog software is WordPress. And you can do a lot with it, because WordPress has some pretty powerful features. You can select from a wide variety of themes. You can use the standard blog-style front page, or you can customize your website’s front page. You can use it to put up simple, static pages as well as timely, dynamic content. Users can post comments on blog posts, if you allow it. And WordPress supports other Web 2.0 features, too, like feeds, pings, and trackbacks, making WordPress an excellent Web 2.0 marketing tool. And there are many WordPress plug-ins, opening up even more features. Some people have put together whole websites just using WordPress. And WordPress is 100% free software.

Most of these bloggers are not professional web developers, or even technical people. It’s easy to set up and use WordPress. Any competent web developer can install WordPress and show you how to use it. Many high-school and college students can as well.

My preferred hosting company, DreamHost, has a one-click WordPress install feature. (So does midPhase, and many others—Just ask your host whether they support WordPress.) Or you can download WordPress from WordPress.org.

There’s good documentation at the WordPress.org Codex. And some good WordPress tips and tricks on the DreamHost support wiki.

CMS's: Flying with Jet Fuel

For the most elaborate websites, you should consider a content-management system, or CMS. That’s a mouthful, but it only means software that lets you manage your website content. A good content-management system will let you do everything WordPress can do, and more. A CMS is more general than a blog. The main purpose of a blog is to let you post content day by day, as in a news feed. A CMS can do this, but it can also handle other content, displaying it in a number of ways.

There are a number of alternatives. One popular CMS is Joomla, and DreamHost has a one-click install for it. I prefer Drupal for my websites. For example, LucrativeWebDesign.com runs on Drupal. Both Joomla and Drupal are free software.

Another example is Gilmore-ism.com, my fan site for the TV show Gilmore Girls. Some of the features on this site are custom-programmed, such as the quotes database. The theme is also highly customized. But most of the features on the site use built-in Drupal features or off-the-shelf Drupal modules.

Consider all the ways Drupal helped me put together this site:

  • The front-page dashboard is all based on standard features and off-the-shelf modules. The various lists are either standard blocks available from different modules, or they are custom views of the content on the site.
  • The “Random Quote” feature is also a custom view of the content, like the lists on the front page. It’s a view of a single, random quote.
  • The “RSS” feature is a feed of front-page content. Like a blog feed, this is a Web 2.0 feature that allows users to get an automatic list of the new content on the site.
  • The “Content from Other Sites” feature is Web 2.0 at its finest. It automatically republishes a list of links to select sites that themselves have RSS feeds.
  • The “Search” feature is built-into Drupal. It automatically searches all the content on the site. There’s also an off-the-shelf alternative that uses Google search.
  • Users can register for a free account on the site and submit comments and certain content. This is a built-in feature, and all I needed to do was to enable it.
  • Users can rate articles on the site and get recommended content based on their ratings and the ratings of other users. These features were all in off-the-shelf modules. All I needed to do was to install them.

There are plenty of do-it-yourselfers who install and maintain CMS-based websites, using Drupal, Joomla, and other software. You’ll also find consultants and developers who can provide the features that meet your specialized requirements.