CMS Pros, Cons and Reviews
Posted on April 1, 2008
Filed Under Web Design Business | Leave a Comment
The first and one of the best content management systems I’ve used for client web sites is Content Seed. The system is available in both ASP and PHP versions. The license is very reasonably priced at $149.00 Unlike most software, the license is for unlimited domains and updates are free for life. So if you are looking to add CMS to more than one site this is an excellent value.
Installing and “seeding” a page is a fairly simple operation which involves uploading your files, setting folder permissions and placing a bit of code “the seed” on your page to indicate where the editable text will appear. I should mention here that if you do have any difficulties or question about your installation you will be more than pleasantly surprised with the customer support. Chris Leeds, the developer and owner of Content Seed answers his emails and phone calls personally!
The pros are obvious. Your client can edit the content on the pages you set-up to work with Content Seed. The editor is easy to use, looks like MS Word, has all the editing and formatting features you would expect, including the ability to upload images and supporting files like PDF documents. This system even comes with comprehensive help videos so your clients can see a demonstration of the feature in question. Additioanl features include the ability for cliens to back-up their content and assign user log-ins to edit specific pages.
Really, I can’t say enough about this product – it pretty much has it all. And, there is where the Pro and the Con of CMS reside together; In the fact that your client now has a full text editor and the ability to upload images to their web pages.
Cons:
- Clients will overwrite CSS rules by changing fonts, text size, colors, alignment, case, underline & bold everything (because everything is that important!)
- Clients will upload enormous image files. This will result not only in page load time issues but also in page display by exceeding the container size in divs and tables.
- Clients that don’t update their site regularly will always forget how to do it and call you for instructions, passwords etc.
- Clients will copy and paste from other web sites and documents picking up code and formatting and inadvertantly drop it into their own site. There is a paste text only function but no matter how often you remind them to use it, they will not.
- You will be contacted to fix these issues on a regular basis.
It has been my experience that unless a client uses the tools regularly and correctly (rare) then I actually spend more time fixing and instructing then I would if I simply updated the site myself. In these cases the CMS is not as cost effective to clients as it could be.
Comments
Leave a Reply
-
VisiStat is a Real-time Website hit counter that dynamically captures visitor habits, click path, geographical location, search engine keyword usage & more. Live Demo and 7 day Free trial -
