A smart business will always find a way to do things the smart way. Labor-intensive tasks are no-nos and the preferred way of handling them is by either totally getting rid of them to begin with, or finding other ways to achieve the same intended results with as little effort as possible. It isn’t the “lazy way” – it is about creating more time to do other things because, as any small business owner will know and tell you, there just isn’t enough time in the day to do everything at once.
And so, if you have a website for your business, you will probably either also have someone on the side updating it for you from time to time or you take whatever precious little time you have from your main business activities and dedicate it to running the site.
Either way, if you want to stay in the lead, it will require the most efficient way of performing the various tasks required to keep a healthy and productive website up: managing its content.
Luckily, there are Content Management Systems (CMS) out there that your business can adopt and use: some are free, others will cost you, but rest assured about one thing: they will all help you one way or the other.
A CMS is basically software created to help you manage, update and remove content from your website with relative ease and with a reduced chance of making mistakes.
Here’s how CMS can help your business website management:
You don’t need to be a Guru: a CMS makes it easy for you to edit your site’s pages, make changes to content and update your news and stats like a pro. It will make you look good without your having to go to IT school.
It will give you an impressive result that will make you a star with your colleagues, a source of envy for your competitors and an appreciated service provider by your clients.
You Have Separate Structures and Content: in a normal, non-CMS-supported website the content and the structure (HTML etc.) is integrated. In other words, the content and the code are intermingled. Should you need to change your template or add a new feature to the site or one of its pages, you are going to have to be extra careful you don’t delete some of the code and bring the whole thing down.
But, if you have a CMS system running, you can apply a full template with the click of a button and simply reassign the content to their new positions on the site – with no risk of your site crashing.
Your website will not crash and cost you your customers’ trust.
Content Cells are Blissfully Independent: when you’re working on one cell of your site’s content and are trying various configurations, editions, spacing etc. until you find something you like, you will see all the changes reflected in just that one part. All the other parts remain the same. You can appreciate this when thinking of how maddeningly angering it is after making changes in one part of your site you discover it has messed up another.
Again, your website won’t suffer any downtime due to updates.
You don’t Even Have to be there: after you have figured out the correct way to configure your access permissions, you can create accounts and assign privileges to your colleagues. Once you’re done you can all send in your content via email or texts and it will appear on your site.
In case of new events or happenings, you can have the information out in a matter of minutes – from anywhere in the world.
Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a Breeze: one of the most tedious, and yet quiet integral, things about running a successful business website is having to follow everything up with a social media campaign. Once you have made an announcement on your site, you have to go around repeating the great news on all the social media platforms. You could forget a platform or make mistakes in the posts and tweets – in short you are prone to errors out of sheer routine boredom.
With CMS, the SMM is automatic – you can specify what section (or any and all) of your website should be broadcasted to all social media networks whenever a change is made. Seconds after your content is changed – the world knows about it.
Standards and Best Practices are maintained: there is nothing more unprofessional-like than having a website with sub-par features. Links, buttons, fonts, image sizes – everything – should remain constant throughout your site. Whenever you add or remove a page, your menu should reflect it. A change of color in one place should show on every page…
When you have a lot of pages and content, it can get quite tedious just keeping track of it all. But, guess what? With a CMS in place you won’t even have to give it a second thought.
In short, what we can say is that using a CMS on a business website helps it look and perform better. Everyone is happy: you have less work and worry, your colleagues can take part in website activities and your customers will have a great end-product to visit and interact with.
