It’s easy to become overly familiar with all the jargon and acronyms of websites when you deal with it day-in day-out. The reality is however that if you casually mention things like CSS, CMS or JSX to the uninitiated you’re liable to get a rather blank stare, or at best an unknowing nod.
If you’re in the market for a new website or updates to your existing offering it’s quite likely that people will talk to you about your CMS, and perhaps expect that you know what it means or what it does.
Put simply, a CMS, or Content Management System, is the backbone of your website and generally provides an admin interface with a means to update various sections of your site. Visitors to your website will not see any evidence of this CMS when they browse your site, it’s mainly to do with how you maintain, edit and serve data to the frontend of your site.
Say your website has a blog section. If you wanted to add a blog entry (such as this one) to your website, you’d generally log into a specific part of your website (perhaps your website address with /admin at the end) with your administration credentials. From here you’ll be presented with a whole host of “behind the scenes” options which help you manage your content. You can add a blog entry, edit an image, that sort of thing.
There are literally thousands of Content Management Systems out there for all sorts of different uses. The most common one you might encounter is Wordpress, in fact it powers roughly 60% of the Internet. It’s designed to be intuitive enough for most people to pick up and use and has a very accessible learning curve.
We never expect customers to be completely clued-up on the particular CMS their website should use, we select one that works best for what they’re looking to achieve and will provide the best user experience and best performing site. Full training is always provided with the handover process of any new website and we can also support you going forwards if you need it.
TL;DR – it’s the content of your website and a means to update it.