Why CMS won’t replace your Web Personnel

/rant on

Somewhere out in marketing land someone has been trying to sell people on the idea that installing a CMS, such as WordPress or Drupal, will somehow make all your Webmaster or Web Designer needs go away. If you’ve believed this, I’m sorry to tell you, but unless your site is just text, you’re probably wrong.

While you can hire a Web Developer or Agency to build out a custom theme for your CMS, you’ll still need someone to maintain the site. Even if that person is only plugging in content they’ll need to touch HTML and CSS at some point. If you don’t believe me, try building a complex table with any WYSIWYG editor in Drupal the next time you really want to post that excel data online and you’ll either settle for a simple table or you’ll kick the project over to your web person so they can style it for you, or at the very least add in the proper Class=”blah” tags where needed.

And that’s just for general page information. If you, like most groups, ever want something built out that that requires anything from different links on the side bars to a block or widget of additional information, you’ll probably find that you need someone who actually knows how to work with modules like Views or Panels for Drupal or Widgets and Page Templates if you’re using WordPress.

Unfortunately many business managers out there hear the words Content Management System and they think that their receptionist or office manager will just be able to simply copy and paste the Word documents he sends over into the companies CMS backed website and magically it will look just the way he wants. Sorry, unless it’s text only, that won’t happen. This is why you’ll more than likely need to hire a Content Producer at the very least.

Oh, and we haven’t even gotten to the actual Web Operations part of a site, which is probably the only portion of your website you could most likely outsource to a hosting company.

/rant off

Leave Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.