What you Should Know About your Website
Small Business Website Basics
Content management systems – so easy you can manage your own website.
To manage your own website, I advise you to use a content management system – abbreviated CMS!
With a CMS it is possible that you manage almost all functionalities on your website yourself. With most systems, you can create users, add content, upload images, and much more.
What does a CMS look like?
You can think of a CMS as a kind of Word running online on your server.
As soon as you want to add a new page or change existing content, simply click on the appropriate page. This will then be loaded and you can make your desired changes and then save them.
Besides the content, the administration of this content is part of the basic scope of a CMS. The administration normally includes functions like deleting an article or adding a link to the main navigation when you have written a new page.
How do I get a CMS?
Software now makes it so easy to create and maintain a website that it doesn’t require a degree in computer science or similar knowledge.
Even the initial installation is now possible with one click: there is a 1-click installation for common systems with many web hosts. In concrete terms, this means: You select a hoster, register with your desired domain. After that, you will see a 1-click installation option in the administration area of your web hosting package.
Select your desired system and the installation will be performed automatically.
If this is not an option, you will often need the log-in data for your database – common is MySQL.
Most CMSs come with an installation wizard where you can enter the login for the database. In the next step, you will be asked to create a username and password for the first user, the administrator.
That’s it, after a few minutes you can start working on your own website.
Which CMS is right for me?
There are various CMSs translated from English for the German-speaking world, from which you can choose. To approach this in a relatively non-judgmental way, let’s look at the most popular CMSs used by websites on the Internet.
According to Netcraft, there were just under 1.3 billion websites at the beginning of 2020. Over 50% use more popular CMSs. With the help of these figures, some trends can be identified.
WordPress has a Market share of over 60% and is growing every month!
Far behind are other systems that some may have already heard of: Joomla, Drupal, Wix, Typo3, Jimdo, and many others.
If you choose WordPress, you will directly have many noteworthy advantages that come with a well-known and widespread system.
- Many plug-ins to extend functionality.
- Many themes to offer something for every taste and industry.
- Many integrations with other software.
- Easily locate experts who can help with more in-depth requirements.
How much does WordPress cost?
Furthermore, WordPress is open source – this means that the source code is available for all to use. Furthermore, WordPress is published under the GPLv2 license. Simplified and not quite correctly expressed: WordPress is free.
If you have special requirements for your website, you can resort to the mentioned plug-ins for WordPress.
Extremely popular plug-ins help you create contact forms and image galleries, for example.
Other plug-ins help you optimize for search engines like Google, Bing, and more.
There are plug-ins that speed up your WordPress website and there are plug-ins with which you can build a store in WordPress. In total, there are over 50,000 plug-ins for WordPress in the WordPress plug-in directory. The most popular ones have already been installed over 5 million times!
If WordPress is so widely used, when or what do you use the other CMSs for?
This is not an easy question to answer and should be decided based on individual needs. Many systems available today have a long history and their focus may have changed over the years.
WordPress was originally a system focused on bloggers.
Joomla, Drupal, and Typo3 are also content management systems. Joomla and Drupal both have a market share of about 4% and 3%, respectively, and Typo3 is less than one percent.
Drupal is aimed at requirements that are somewhat more complex. It integrates very well with other systems and offers high flexibility in how data and content are generated and presented.
All four content management systems are further developed by a large international group of developers, offer various plug-ins and themes or templates, and there are many popular websites that cite each CMS as a reference.
Content Management-System as Service
A different approach is taken by providers such as Wix, Squarespace, WordPress.com, Jimdo, and the like. These companies offer a Content management-System as a Service.
This means that you do not have to take care of hosting or installing the software yourself. After the registration, you start creating the website directly.
Depending on the provider, there are also different themes and plug-ins. The advantages of such providers are quite clear:
It’s even easier to create your own website since you don’t have to worry about hosting yourself. Updates are automatically incorporated by the provider and you can focus on your website and content.
Disadvantages are, for example, the dependence on the provider of the software: functions and restrictions are at the discretion of the provider and you can only use what the provider specifies. In addition, all your data is stored with a provider and you don’t know exactly what is done with the data or what can happen to it.
What should I consider for my new Website?
Overall, I advise all companies to take care of the website themselves at least a little bit. If you register your domain yourself, you are in control of it.
I have often seen here that the domain owner was the service provider who had created the website. After some time, disagreements arose between the service provider and the business owner and a transfer of the domain to the actual owner was anything but smooth.
If you decide to build your own website based on a CMS, look for 1-click installations that make it easy to get started.
If you tend to use a SaaS provider, check the possible costs carefully beforehand. Here, it may be that each module costs extra money and quickly adds up to quite a high monthly sum, which you could better invest in search engine marketing.