The acronym CMS stands for content management system and refers to websites where the content can be managed by the owner without knowledge of html. This is a generally understood principal in abstract, however, there are a lot of misconceptions about what can be done through a CMS by a website owner and there are some common misunderstandings that are left un-clarified too often by professionals.
What a CMS is.
A content management system works by allowing the website owner to edit particular pieces of text, and sometimes embed images and video and other such things. Depending on the software used, these editable areas will vary. The important thing to note is that you will not be able to change any aspect of your website design or text on your own. What you will be able to edit will depend on the system used and your level of comfort with learning about it.
With a CMS, pages are not created individually; instead a content management system will create the pages of the website or blog and apply a layout to each depending on how the theme or template creator has specified. The design and possibly some of the content is applied through the use of a theme or template. Generally a site owner will not have the skills or need to modify the theme or template.
Essentially, what is being created by a designer/developer for CMS based websites is a frame with rules of how your website should look in certain scenarios. These templates/themes can be either found online for free or purchase. They can also be custom designed and coded for your business for the CMS you choose. Free/purchased templates are used by many websites and may not fit the needs of your business quite right. If you go the custom route and have a good designer/developer they will be able to appropriately anticipate your evolving content needs for your selected CMS and can create a very professional and unique looking website. This way you can focus on creating content which is the most important component of a successful website.
What a CMS is not.
There are some website and desktop software programs you can buy that allow the creation of .html pages without any knowledge of html. Although you can manage your content in addition to generating the code used for all aspects of the website, these are not content management systems. They are website creators, and they do not have most of the advantages that content management systems do.
One unfortunate side effect of website owners having complete control over the code through unintelligent website creation software is that this type of software creates terrible, badly coded, broken and ugly websites. Non-technical folks do not have a solid grasp of usability, aesthetics and browser compatibility and the software doesn’t either. Although this can be an economical way to put some information about your business on the web, you are not going to make a professional impression on people by any stretch, and without the knowledge of how to build search engine friendly sites, you will also have less guests. So if you really don’t have any money to spend on a website, you would be better off using google sites, or wordpress.com to generate some kind of website in the interim. I am not recommending that these are good ways to create websites, but they will likely be cheaper, less of a headache and wordpress.com is definitely going to create a less horribly coded website than using a program like pagemaker or trying to muddle through dreamweaver or something similar. You would still be sacrificing a professional image, but you would at least spend less time and frustration to get there.
Summing it up
Without going into the nuances of these concepts, this is a good overview of what a content management system is, and what it is not. This is important knowledge for you if at any time you are in need of a website either personally or for your business. It will also hopefully reduce the frustration and learning curve that often comes with just learning what goes into the process of getting a website up and running.
The advantages of a CMS are vast if it is a good one, and yes, the quality and cost of a CMS does vary greatly. Finding someone to create a custom theme or template for a good (and preferably open source) CMS will generally be more costly than less experienced professionals, but ultimately the end result should far outweigh the alternative. This is true when you consider both the money saved because you don’t have to pay for updates and also the generally higher quality of the websites that are created through good CMSes when used with good themes/templates.
