Content Management Systems (CMS)
A Content Management System organises and facilitates collaborative creation of documents and other content. It can apply to any computer software system but is used more specifically to manage websites and web content, allowing many people to collaborate on editing a central website.
Pros
- Users with little or no technical skills can add content to a website
- A range of CMS software has been developed with sector in mind
Cons
- Specially designed in-house system can be expensive
- With more content, large-scale websites can become difficult to navigate
Beware
- With more than one contributor, consistency of style and quality can be hard to maintain
- Open source software may be free, but maintaining and supporting it costs time and money
Open source solutions can keep costs down. Three of the best known are Joomla!, Mambo and Plone. These do require technical experience to initially set-up and to re-configure a website, but once established they are straightforward to edit.
Another method, recommended by some web designers, is to use Macromedia Contribute. This is marketed as a low cost solution for people who need to update websites regularly, but do not have the technical expertise to use a web design package. Editing pages in Contribute has been designed to be almost as simple as editing a word-processed document.
Case-study on a Content Management System for the community: Leicestershire County Council
Leicestershire County Council have been building up an ICT community since 2001 to help address rural isolation by providing information and services electronically. They built a Content Management System to allow communities to manage their own information. The system is easy to use with no technical skills required and has a hierarchical management system, so a user can register and add content at an appropriate level.
If organisations are transferring their existing website to this technology they can still maintain the look and feel of their existing website. Posting can be made village/district/county wide to enable people to reach as wide an audience as required. Rather than posting information many times on many different websites, information can be posted once and appear on several websites
Further reading: ICT Hub's knowledgebase, Wikipedia
Related Pages: ICT Tools
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