Not All Content Management Systems Are Created Equal

Part of me feels like CMS (Content Management Systems) has become something of a buzzword over the last year or two. I guess there’s good reason for that. For over a decade, web developers held the keys to the kingdom. If you wanted to make a simple change to your website like updating your phone number, you needed to get down on your hands and knees and beg the dude who built your website a year ago to make time in his schedule to do the update. Even if it was changing a few numbers, you would get a bill.

So a CMS gives you the power to make those type of changes yourself. The purpose of content management is to make your life easier, and some content management setups are better at this than others.

We recently put together a small site for one of our clients, Walter Knabe. This site is primarily a gallery of his fine art pieces that are available for sale. As he completes new pieces of art, they are added to this site.

The newest pieces have a small red ribbon at the top corner that says New. As you can probably imagine, it’s important that this ribbon only shows up on art pieces that truly are new.

Ten years ago, you would have to pay for your web developer to go in once a week and update this sort of thing. Now we can just set your site up to use content management, but not all CMS’s are created equal.

An unsophisticated approach would be to give you a little checkbox next to each picture in the admin area of the site. When you add or edit a picture, you would just click the checkbox if the red ribbon should appear. When the box doesn’t have a check, no ribbon. This approach gets the job done, but there’s a problem. You have to go back in a few weeks later and uncheck the box when the piece is no longer new.

We can do better. On Walter’s site you set in one place how long you want the new ribbon to appear. 14 days. 30 days. If you were selling new cars, maybe you would mark them as new for a whole year. Whatever is appropriate for your site, you set that time period in one place. You’re done.

The system will automatically calculate how long ago each image was added to the site. If it’s within your set time period, it’s marked as new. As soon as enough time passes, the new banner will stop appearing on it’s own. That’s a smart CMS: one that saves you time and does work for you.