Wide World Of Web Design

CMS: Content Management System
(photo from www.joomla.org)
When starting out as a Web Designer, there’s a point where you feel like you’re finally getting the hang of creating some slick HTML pages with valid CSS layouts, and the learning curve on creating professional looking web graphics is getting shorter too, and you’re even picking up some Javascript and PHP along the way! However … even after all this work to get your web pages looking good while maintaining proper web standards and cross-browser compatibility, now the client wants the ability to edit their own pages because the content changes regularly. Not only that, but they’ve also decided they want their website to be able to do a bunch of other stuff (Store, Blog, User Submitted Content) especially since they’ve noticed other websites doing lots of really cool stuff!

In a Design House, the Graphics and Layout team would simply kick it over to the Development team, which would then get busy writing a bunch of code to create dynamic server pages so that the client’s website could do all that stuff . . . but seeing as you don’t have that option (unless of course you and the client are willing to contract out some 3rd party coders), now’s the time to get familiar with the various Open Source Content Management Systems and WYSIWYG HTML editing software that is available.

If it’s just a matter of the client wanting to edit/update their own content, then it probably doesn’t warrant a full scale CMS but rather a WYSIWYG HTML editing software that can be applied to a website, enabling content authors to log in and easily make updates without having to know HTML. The client will be quite pleased because now they don’t have to call you up every time they want something added or changed, and then you’ll look like a hero for being able to provide such a nifty set-up.

The two best solutions for this would be either Adobe Contribute, which is easy enough for anyone to use and in my opinion is the best one of it’s kind out there (and with a $180 price tag per license it’s not an outrageous sum of money) or Cushy CMS, which offers a Free online service that is similar although somewhat limited in comparison. With CushyCMS, the most notable limitation would be the fact that it doesn’t have an image uploader, so even though the Text Editor allows you to insert an image, you have to input a filepath to an image that already resides on a server. This means the user would require the use of an FTP Client in addition to Cushy CMS in order to upload and insert the desired images.

Now, when choosing an actual CMS you can do some comparison shopping by going to opensourcecms.com where you can test drive a demo version of pretty much every CMS available, which are also categorized. But I can also save you some time by simply recommending what I think are the best ones to have: Joomla! (Full site CMS), PHPBB or Vanilla (Community Forums), Wordpress (Blog), Zencart or OSCommerce (store/shopping cart).

If you’re not familiar with how a CMS works or you’ve never installed and used one, it’s probably a good idea to try one of the portable CMS applications as an introduction on how the installation, configuration, extensibility, and customization works. The two best ones to download and install (go ahead, what are you waiting for ?) would be PHPBB, and Wordpress, both of which could also be used as standalone websites.

These will give you some insight into what to expect when using the Backend Administration and applying the extensions which will give your site layers of functionality. And this is only to get your feet wet, all in preparation for the Big Daddy of Content Management Systems, a complete website solution which need only be applied if you have some time on your hands and the patience to learn it. If you stick with it however you’ll see it as a worthwhile way to provide complete websites that can do things you didn’t know were possible, let alone something you ever had a hope of achieving by yourself . . .

I am of course talking about Joomla! (current version is 1.5), one of the most powerful open-source content management systems that exists, and although it may seem a little daunting at first, it is well worth immersing yourself in. It helps to know some PHP for editing purposes, but for the most part you’ll spend countless hours testing extensions and asking questions on the Forums until you feel like you have it mostly figured out.

But once you do, it’s quite possible you’ll join the ranks of many who have simply abandoned the traditional web designer role in favor of implementing and customizing Joomla sites for clients. Although it’s not quite as satisfying as building your own sites from the ground up, eventually you can delve into creating your own templates that will work with the Joomla core application and then you’ll feel worthy of Rock Star status.

If you are interested in learning more about the best open-source CMS on the planet, and eventually you will be, probably the best resource to learn from is Joomla! A User’s Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website by Barrie North, who also has a website called CompassDesign which is well known as a valued source for it’s Joomla! related News, Info and Tutorials.

But if you’re also someone who’s interested in learning how to design and implement some basic server-side functionality of your own, you can crack a book on PHP or stay posted for some future Tutorials I’ll be presenting on The Learning Series where I’ll use Dreamweaver CS3 to create dynamic pages for things like a User Login, Blog, and News&Events section for your website.

It’s important for a website to look good, but you’ll also soon realize there’s a lot of satisfaction in being able to make it do stuff !