If all this talk of coding and designing scares you off, you
might want to know that there is an alternative to all this. You
can install a kind of software called a Content Management
System (CMS) that allows you to put content up on the web
without ever knowing a thing about HTML.
Now in its 8th Edition, the acclaimed CMS Report provides a
comprehensive overview of Web Content Management products and
best practices, including updated, 5- to 12-page comparative
surveys of 31 Web CMS packages (26 in the Standard Edition), as
well as short descriptions of 15 other products across 7 vendor
categories.
The report is ideal for companies looking to develop a
business-driven Content Management strategy, or who are
considering selecting a CMS product and need unbiased technical
assessments, or who simply need a clearly-written guide to this
confusing, fast-changing landscape. Further details can been
found here:
http://www.cmswatch.com/CMS/Report/
Fantastico
Depending on your host, you might find that you already have a
selection of CMSes available and ready to install from your
cPanel. Log in, and take a look for the Fantastico script
installer. If you have it, then you'll be able to read a
description of each piece of software you have available to you
- try out a few of the CMSes to see which ones you like.
Finding a CMS
If you don't have Fantastico on your host, or you don't like
what it offers you, don't worry: there's plenty of choice out
there on the web when it comes to CMS software.
For finding free CMS software, a truly excellent resource is
www.opensourcecms.com. At that site, you can use the menu at the
side of the page to see lots of open source CMSes running before
you commit to downloading them and installing them yourself.
Textpattern, Drupal and Plone are very popular right now, so
they're a good place to start.
If you're considering commercial CMSes as well, then you should
take a look at
www.cmsmatrix.org, which provides an up-to-date
comparison of almost every CMS out there. Be prepared, though,
that commercial CMSes can be ridiculously expensive or
unnecessarily expensive.
Getting a Custom CMS Built
If nothing out there seems to meet your needs, you might
consider having a web designer build you a custom CMS in a
scripting language like Perl or PHP. Any web designer worth
their salt should have something basic already that they can
build whatever features you want onto. This can be really good
when it comes to making your website work the way you want,
since the CMS will be built around your website to make it as
easy as possible for you to modify.
Using a CMS
The whole point of a CMS is to make it much easier to add
content to your website and to edit the content that's already
there. Once you've installed your CMS, you will generally be
able to log into its user system using a special admin password.
This will add 'edit' options to the existing pages of the site,
as well as giving you a 'new page' link somewhere to allow you
to create a new page.
When it comes to actually writing the content of the pages, most
CMSes will make it easy for you to copy and paste from programs
like Word: they shouldn't require any special HTML formatting.
Some will require you to mark words with special symbols if you
want them to be bold or italic, but it shouldn't be too
troublesome.
Changing the design with a CMS usually involves installing a
template into a template folder and then selecting it in the
options. Creating your own templates can be complicated,
depending on what software you're using, but it shouldn't be any
trouble for a web designer, and most template sites will provide
designs in a format suitable for this kind of use
Finding a Hosted CMS
Once you know which CMS you want, an alternative to installing
it on a web host that doesn't necessarily support it is to do a
search and find a host that specifically supports your CMS. You
shouldn't have too much trouble finding a host somewhere that
will support you - if nothing else, you might try
opensourcehost.com, which supports almost every open source CMS
out there.
Using a host solution might be a little more expensive, but it
will save you a lot of time in configuration and a lot of
problems if anything goes wrong. Using a hosted CMS is one of
the quickest ways to set up a website: you simply pay the host,
log in, add your content and you're away.
About the author:
Original Source:
Articles-Galore.com
Information supplied and written by Lee Asher of The Home Income Portal
Home of Serious Online Business Options.
