Web Management Systems – Manage You Web Services with Ease

One of the biggest challenges faced by any company or individual with an internet presence is the problem of maintaining and developing their websites. Dealing with ever increasing numbers of often complex web pages and maintaining the navigational links between them is causing headaches for webmasters throughout cyberspace.

The Solution?

Many organizations have tackled the issue by installing a Web Management System (CMS) to manage their websites.

What is a Web Management System?

Web Management Systems (CMSs) are available in a variety of guises and are normally considered to be a set of software tools for creating, amending and managing web. A large number of software vendors have entered the CMS marketplace and the products on offer vary widely in price and functionality.

Websites have moved on from the early days of being sets of 'hand-crafted' HTML pages. Nowadays, web can be almost any kind of digital information, including text, graphics, images, sound and video. Any serious CMS needs to be able to handle this multiplicity of digital data and also be able to retrieve information from databases, incorporate output from a variety of other software (e.g. PDF files and spreadsheets) and ideally be able to integrate with e-commerce, groupware and social networking functions.

In order to build and maintain a successful website, this mixture of digital Web needs to be managed in a coherent manner. One of the functions of a CMS is to ensure that the Web is displayed in a consistent and easy to navigate fashion.

Choosing a Website Management System

Website Management - As with other software suppliers, many Web Management System (CMS) vendors indulge in excessive marketing hype in the way that they promote their CMS offerings. When choosing a CMS, it is important to identify the features that are relevant for the administration of your particular websites.

Most CMS software incorporates three main features:

- access to web documents' by multiple non-technical authors, including version control and access to previous versions;

- workflow control to allow editing and quality issues to be resolved before publication online;

- separate storage of web documents and web publishing templates (which control the 'look and feel' of the website); web pages are created by using different combinations of web and web publishing templates.

Some CMS software packages offer additional functionality including:

- real-time online publishing: software incorporating easy to use Web authoring and online publication tools which facilitate the rapid creation and update of web logs (blogs) and electronic magazine and news websites;

- e-commerce: ability to create online shopping websites including acceptance of payments by credit card and online payment systems (e.g. PayPal);

- document management: enables management of all documents used within an organization, not just documents used in web publishing, (this functionality is particularly useful for organizations where collaborative working on documents is useful, e.g. multinational companies, the legal profession, government departments, etc).

Future CMS Developments

When making decisions regarding the purchase of any new computer software, likely future technological advances should be anticipated wherever possible. This consideration is particularly pertinent in relation to web-related software, if rapid obsolescence is to be avoided.

Attempts are ongoing to provide web on a variety of hardware devices beyond the desktop PC. Some of the earlier efforts (e.g. the WAP mobile phone) had limited success but digital television and newer mobile devices including smartphones and WiFi-enabled PDAs are increasingly being used to display web. A number of vendors are now marketing CMS software which will control the distribution of web-based material to different hardware platforms in a unified manner.

One thing is certain - with the increasing ubiquity of the web, website web management systems are here to stay.