Managing Content

The main asset of most Web sites is content.* And it's important that you be able to get to and change all of that content yourself. If you have to contact the design firm or your IT department to make a change, you're less likely to do it, and it will happen in weeks, not minutes.

So, managing your own content is a huge benefit. But, of course, like so many good things, it can also be a giant pain. You shouldn't have to learn some elaborate system just to change some copy on your home page. And if you add a new product, you shouldn't have to go to six places to add a link to the product. A well designed system knows how to do this for you.

This is why content management systems have become so ubiquitous over the last decade. They let actual users manage their own content, without having to learn a whole lot of new applications and markup code. The content management system I use and deploy for my clients is Drupal; and there's more about that on the next page.

*Sure, there are some sites where the main asset is logic, i.e., the site has some advanced functionality that doesn't involve content delivery.