Using a CMS in Website Development and Design

CMS stands for Content Management System. As the name implies, a CMS is used to manage the content of a web site. If a site is updated frequently and if people other than web developers need to update the content of a web site, a CMS is used. Today, many sites are built on a CMS. The CMS can also allow content of a web site to be updated from any location in the world.

A CMS can be built specifically for a web site, and many web development companies build their own CMS which can be used by their clients. A CMS can also be bought pre-built, and there are many open source pre-built CMS available, some of which are free.

A CMS should be selected with the goals and functions of the web site in mind. A CMS needs to be able to scale along with the web site and business that it supports, and not the other way round! Of course, the CMS selected should result in a web site that is search engine friendly.

Here are some key features to look out for when selecting or building a CMS: 

• Meta and Title Tag customisation: the CMS should allow you to enter your own meta tags for each page, as well as allow full customisation of title tags for each page.
• HTML tag customisation: the CMS should allow for full customisation of title tags, such as nofollow links.
• URLs: instead of using dynamic parameters, the CMS should allow for serverside rewriting of URLs. It  should allow for the creation of URLs that are:Static, Rewritable, keyword rich
• Customisable navigation: a good CMS will allow flexibility when it comes to creating the information architecture for a web site. For the purposes of adding additional content for search engines, a CMS should not require that all content pages be linked to from the home page navigation. This allows content to be added for SEO purposes, without adding it to the main navigation.
• 301 redirect functionality: it is imperative that a CMS offers the ability to put in place 301 redirects to prevent penalisation for duplicate content on different URLs.
• Customisable image naming and alt tags for images: a good CMS will allow you to create custom alt tags and title attributes.
• Robots.txt management: ensure you are able to customise the robots.txt to your needs, or that this can at least be managed using the meta tags.
• Searching of content: make sure you are able to include a useful site search. 

Be aware when building clean, descriptive and dynamic URLs from CMS content. Should you use a news heading (“Storm” in this example) as part of your URL (http://www.web sitename.com/cape/storm) and someone changes the heading to “Tornado” (http://www.site.com/cape/tornado), this will alter the URL and the search engines will index this as a new page, but with the same content as the URL which had the old heading. Bear this in mind before adding dynamic parameters to your URLs.

Finally, using a CMS system that supports standards compliant HTML and CSS is very important - as without it inconsistencies may be rendered across various browsers. It also ensures faster loading time and reduced bandwidth, makes mark-up easier to maintain, supports SEO efforts and ensures that every single visitor to a web site, no matter what browser they are using, will be able to see everything on the site.

Technical considerations

As a whole technology should act only as an enabler. It should never be a site’s main focus. Here are some technical considerations vital for a good web site:

Proprietary vs. open source: an important consideration when building a new site, and all avenues should be explored. Open source software is fully customizable and benefits from a large developer community. Propriety software usually includes support in its price.

URL rewriting: it is vital that important URLs in your site are indexable by the search engines. Ensure that URL rewriting is enabled according to the guidelines in this chapter. URL rewriting should be able to handle extra dynamic parameters that might be added by search engines for tracking purposes.

GZIP compression : this helps to speed up download times of a web page, improving user experience.

Server-side form validation: form validation is the process whereby the data entered into a form is verified in order to meet certain preset conditions (e.g. ensuring that the name and email address fields are filled in).

Client-side validation relies on JavaScript, which is not necessarily available to all visitors. Client-side validation can alert a visitor to an incorrectly filled in form most quickly, but server-side validation is the most accurate. It is also important to have a tool to collect all of the failed tests and present appropriate error messages neatly above the form the user is trying to complete. This will ensure that correctly entered data is not lost, but repopulated in the form to save time and reduce frustration.

International character support: the Internet has afforded the opportunity to conduct business globally, but this means that web sites need to make provision for non-English visitors. It is advisable to support international characters via UTF-8 encoding; both on the web site itself and in the form data submitted to it.

Search-friendly sessions: sessions can be used to recognise individual visitors on a web site, useful for click-path analysis. Cookies can be used to maintain sessions, but URL rewriting can be used to compensate for users who not have cookies activated.

This means that as visitors move through a web site, their session information is stored in a dynamically generated web address. Search engine spiders do not support cookies, so many web sites will attempt URL rewriting to maintain the session as the spider crawls the web site. However, these URLs are not liked by search engine spiders (as they appear to create a moving target for the robot) and can hinder crawling and indexing.

The work-around: use technology to detect if a visitor to the site is a person or a robot, and do not rewrite URLs for the search engine robots.

Auto generated human readable and XML sitemaps: sitemaps are exceptionally important, both to visitors and to search engines. Technology can be implemented that automatically generates and updates both the human readable and XML sitemaps, ensuring spiders can find new content.

RSS feed generation: Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is an absolute necessity. With all the millions of web and blog sites in existence web users can no longer afford to spend time browsing their favourite sites to see if new content has been added. By enabling RSS feeds on certain sections on the site, especially those that are frequently updated, users will have the content delivered directly to them. Visitors should be able to pick and choose the sections they like to get updates from via a feed.