Disadvantages to Using a Content Management System
As the internet continues to expand exponentially, it is vital that your website is kept up to date, both to entice new visitors to your site with the lure of new content and to keep the search engines interested in your site by allowing them to crawl for new content. In days gone by, this process could be time consuming and costly, with your developer having to perform maintenance on your site such as taking on any changes, creating news pages or adding new images. Even a keen enthusiast who had coded their own site could still get bogged down in HTML and end up with a product that bore no resemblance to the initial site.
With the dawn of open-source, accessible and, most importantly, free content management systems, it looked as though many of these issues would fall by the wayside. But as with any progression, there are bound to be areas which still present problems, and even the latest, greatest, simplest content management systems are not immune to this. Here are just three disadvantages to using a content management system.
1. It can be a lot more costly to set up.
If you decide that you need a web designer to put together your website complete with content management system then that designer is immediately presented with a problem in terms of their quote. In past times, the developer could rely on a fixed monthly fee coming in to cover the costs of making any updates. Now, with a content management system, you are effectively taking the designer out of the equation once the site goes online. To compensate for this loss of regular income, many web designers will charge more for the development up front.
2. Constant tinkering can create or highlight design flaws
In an ideal world, your website would be put together in one particular way, and then maintained in that self same way thus ensuring that the layout and look of the site remains constant. In reality, you or your developer may set up a site in one particular way, but when you add in the prospect of several people from different areas of your organisation - who all have differing levels of IT ability - you are bound to end up with people who follow a "that'll do" attitude; adding to and updating your site in the best way they know how, and with the best of intentions, but ultimately altering things a little bit each time to the point that, six months after your site has gone live, you have a variety of typefaces and font sizes scattered across your homepage, images busting out of the viewport and huge files added which take an age to download.
3. Security risks
This is not to say that a static site is immune from hackers, but as the popularity of open source content management systems increases, there will always be some smart people who decide to exploit whatever loopholes they can find in your content management system to prove a point or to one-up their buddies. It is vital that you keep on top of your CMS site in terms of updates to any plugins and the version of the software you are using. Horror stories litter the web of an innocent webmaster accessing his site only to find that it has been hacked and filled with inappropriate adverts.
No doubt content management systems allow you to keep your site up-to-date in a way not previously possible. But like anything to do with the internet, careful monitoring and judicious housekeeping will pay dividends if you are to maintain the health of your CMS site and keep it looking its best.
Dom Wint is the owner of Clean Page Design Limited, a web design company based in Saddleworth in the UK which specialises in getting small businesses, clubs and charities online. For more information, visit http://www.cleanpagedesign.co.uk/web-design-saddleworth-2.
Category Article Content, Disadvantages, Management, System, Using
