What is a Content Management System?

Content management is the term used to refer to the ways in which your website content is both stored and served for display. First a basic look how the internet works for you.

Your interface with the internet will most likely be a web browser such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Firefox for example. You open the browser and type in the URL of the website you want to access. The browser will send a request across the internet to find where the website is hosted. This may be virtually anywhere in the world. Once it has found the website the host will return information, usually a single page, back to the browser. The browser will then interpret the page and display it for you.

So two computers are involved the host server and the browser client. Content management is the term used for the way the information to be displayed is stored and manipulated by the host.

Two ways that you will encounter are static pages where the page text and layout are pre-written and stored as a single page and dynamic pages where the text for the page is stored in a database and the host builds each page to be displayed using a page template at the time it is requested by the browser.

So what is the difference? Well static pages are served faster but less flexible in terms of display. Dynamic pages can have the same information displayed in different formats depending on the type of page requested. e.g.. you can have a page that displays a single text article or you could have a page that displays an excerpt from several articles giving the user a choice to read more.

There are also more variations in the way the information is entered onto the host and allowance for multiple people all adding extra data at the same time. The main thing about content management systems to be wary of is that they should not be so difficult to either learn or implement that they inhibit what is important and that is the adding and displaying of good content on a regular basis.

Of all the content management systems there are Wordpress is one of the most widely used and easiest to implement with a bit of help.