After you have registered your domain name, choose a web hosting provider, and have your website visible on the web, what do you do next? The next thing is website maintenance. But how? One way I like to maintain my website or others I work with is using a web content management system. First let’s take a look at what a content management system is, the benefits of using one, and look at some content management systems that can be used for personal or business.

What is a Content Management System?

A Content Management Systems is a way to create, manage, distribute, publish, and update your website information.

Benefits to a Content Management System

Even though there are other ways of updating your website, you might decide to choose and use a content management system. What are the benefits of using a content management system? Below are the following benefits to using a content management system:

·         Changes can be updated any time when needed (day or night).

·         If you choose to do so and have staff, they can update the section(s) that they are responsible for.

·         Design and content is separate. This means that you can update or make changes to the design without affecting the content.

·         Use Cascading Style Sheets to maintain the appearance. I really like CSS as it allows you to change the design and color of the CMS site.

·         Create RSS Feeds. Every time you create a post or make a comment, it creates a feed for it.

·         Schedule your content updates. You can set a time to schedule when your articles or post actually can be updated.

Content Management Systems to Use

Where can you find a content management system to use? For starters, most web hosting providers will have a content management system for you to use. For example, the web hosting provider I have has Drupal, Mambo, and Joomla as part of my content management systems. Of course, these are some popular ones to use to make updates as I find anyone of these to be a great tool to use.

On another note, if you would like to use a hosted content management system just to simply update content and do the minimum for other things, I find that CushyCMS which can be found at www.cushycms.com (You can watch the demo on the site and Sign up for free), will allow web designers or content editors to edit content as well as not to install software on their machine. With CushyCMS, there is a free version which I have used and there is one where you can pay which provides more services.

Conclusion

A content management system can be a great tool to use for either personal or business use. A content management system allows you to capability to update your site and have multiple authors take authorship of sections of your site as your site continues to grow.