In the early days of the web, it was common practice to create web pages using HTML and store them as static files on the web server, which would simply pick them up and deliver them to visitors when requested. This system works fine for the first 5 or 10 pages you create, but becomes increasingly burdensome as your site grows — what happens when you need to change the same thing on every page of the website? What happens when you want to give your pages a whole new look? You end up spending quite a bit of time making tedious revisions to batches of files. This is expensive and no fun at all, so website developers started to figure out ways to make this process easier.

The first of these was to break out parts of pages into segments — headers, sidebars, footers, etc., and to have the server simply build pages from these various fragments when requested. This was a huge improvement, but still relatively cumbersome. You still had to know HTML, you still had to FTP up your images and manually path them, and you still had large numbers of files on the server to maintain.

But the development of better methods didn’t stop there; the next step in the process was the development of content management systems (CMSs). CMSs manage all your content through an web browser interface, help you upload files and link to them, and store all your content in a database separate from the “skin” it’s wrapped with before presenting it to users. CMSs offer many benefits, among them:

• Open source or free – this means that anyone can view the source, copy it, and use it. Which means that most systems (and all that MoiaGroup would recommend) are widely used and supported, and there are thousands of developers who use them every day. So if MoiaGroup disappears tomorrow, you easily find someone else to help you. (There are many proprietary CMSs, and many of these are very good, but we don’t recommend tying your website to the fortunes of any single closed-source product or company).
• Extensive Functionality — CMSs have a huge amount of functionality built-in right from the start. Want RSS feeds? WYSIWYG editor? custom meta tags on every page? image slideshows using AJAX? revision histories? site search? scheduled publishing? user commenting? custom feedback forms? You got it — most CMSs will have these and much, much more, and mostly built right in. You go from zero to sixty in a single step.
• Easy to use — most good CMSs are as easy to use as FaceBook — you don’t need to know HTML or have an FTP client to make changes and updates. You just log in, use a visual editor, and make your changes. This can involve uploading photos, moving pages, add press releases, whatever. It all happens through your browser through a simple interface.
• Free maintenance — when you can make the changes yourself, you don’t have to wait for your programmer to fit you into their schedule. And better still, you don’t have to pay them. You only need to call them up to make major structural or design changes or to perform system upgrades. And that tends to be pretty infrequent.
• Distributed maintenance — since most CMSs are browser-based, this means you can edit your website from anywhere. Or share the work with other people at the same time. Or even add new content from your iPhone. If you’re into that.
• Constant upgrades and evolution — because so many people use open source CMSs, there are thousands of developers creating custom plugins to help specific clients solve problems. And many of these developers turn around and share these plugins with the rest of us. So you end up getting functionality you couldn’t afford to develop for yourself — for free! Or you can give back to the community by developing code and releasing it. And a year after you create your website, you can discover a new plugin and just install it, adding to the functionality of your site without losing what you already have.
• Search engine optimization (SEO) — most CMSs have built-in search engine notification. They also make it easy to maintain custom tags and keywords for pages. Last, sites that are updated frequently show up higher in most search engines, and if you’re using a CMS it’s easier to update your site all the time.
• Site-wide changes are easy – most CMSs use “themes,” or sets of templates that content is poured into. So if you want to change the way your site looks, you just create a new theme and turn it on. And you can go back to the old one just as easily.

MoiaGroup provides all of our clients with content Management System (CMS). There are hundreds of them — see this list at WikiPedia – but we generally recommend just a few. WordPress is highly capable, extensible, and has a simple-to-use and elegant administration back-end. Drupal has more power and a more nuanced workflow and ownership model that may be better suited for larger organizations, but the back-end is less friendly and has a steeper learning curve.

Note: Yes, we’re making some sweeping generalizations here. There were lots of steps in between static html and CMS sites. There are some really good proprietary CMS systems. And when we say that CMSs have certain features, we obviously don’t mean that every CMS has every feature. Just the good CMSs. If you really want to know the details look at the CMS Matrix.