What Can and Can't CMS Do For You?

There are tons of open source CMSs downloadable in the internet, among which joomla is quite popular among webmasters. Almost all of them claim that they could help even those who know nothing about HTML build a sophisticated dynamic website within several minutes. I agree that's true. With a strong set of core functions, numerous powerful extensions, and a lot of free or bought templates available in somewhere, putting a website live overnight is not difficult at all. CMS is so fantastic that CMS experience is shared in every corner of the webmaster' world. However, before you take advantage of CMS, I think it is better that you are familiar with what can and can't CMS do for you.

First let's go through briefly what CMS can do for you. CMS, as its name tells us, it's a web content publishing and management system that allows normal content originators to create, submit, and publish their content directly within a web application/site without any development tools or knowledge of HTML. Therefore, in principle, CMS is a management tool which could facilitate the maintenance of your website greatly.

However, what I want to elaborate more about is those things that CMS can't do, since we are more like to make mistakes in this regard. Here I summarized several points for your reference.

• CMS couldn't perform design work for you. You have to prepare your template separately, and leave proper slots in the template for the CMS to layout all types of content, including text, image, and video and so on. Although free templates for any kind of CMS are available here and there, it's highly possible that you can't use them as they are and have to adapt them to your need, which cannot be accomplished without a good knowledge of basic HTML and CSS.

• CMS couldn't create content for you. No matter you use CMS or not, you are the originator of unique content and should be held responsible for the quality of content. CMS won't take over the writing job for you. On the contrary, it only help you manage the content created by you.

• CMS couldn't develop ideas for you. The same as content, you are the one who are held responsible for the creativity and marketability of your idea. If you try to delegate this important task to CMS, your failure is then inevitable.

Based on the aforementioned points with regard to what CMS can't do, we could arrive at the following conclusions:

• If you don't know anything about HTML or CSS, don't try to build any independent website, even if CMS and templates, either free or bought, are both available.
  
• If you don't have any sources to acquire unique contents, don't hope CMS will help you become a great writer
• If you don't have any mature and innovative idea in mind, don't try to become an entrepreneur just because you have acquired the skills of manipulating some kind of CMS.

What do you think? Should any thought, don't hesitate to leave your comments here.

When to build your own website

In the last topic we talked about the ultimate determinants of e-business. We got to know that we should never forget the basics when doing whichever type of business. From now on, I'm going to discuss each small topic with you. Today's topic is: When should we consider building our own website.

When asked why they built their own website from scratch, the answers are always among the followings:

• More flexibility w.r.t design and ad placement
  
• Many open source CMS systems such as joomla make the building of website a piece of cake
  
• With a feeling that independent website can always earn more money than free host such as blogs, wiki and other free hosting providers.
• Others

However, none of the answers listed above ensure that building our own website is a wise decision, that is, will bring us much more return than if we continue to use secondary domain name with free host. Actually, nowadays, bloggers and wordpress are quite effective cash engine for webmasters. You could customize your design. You could almost freely place your ad anywhere in your pages. You could do link building. You could play with social bookmarking. What's more, you could take advantage of some blogging technique, such as auto pinger, to greatly reduce promotion efforts required.

So what on earth determines whether we should consider building our own website? Well, it depends on the competitive advantages of independent website compared with free host service. In my view, the competitive advantages of independent website include the followings:

• Serve as news, company or some other organizations' portal.
  
• Provide service, such as search engine, web directory, blogging, forum, social network service (SNS), and other sorts of service that demands member registration
• E-commerce
• Others...

As you could see, I didn't mention exhibiting unique content as one of the competitive advantages of website. Why? In my view, if you have unique content, putting your content in a blog provided either by wordpress or blogspot is enough for you to achieve as least the same result as if you build your own website. In many cases, the return ensured by free blogs is much higher than independent websites. The reason might include:

• Independent website is more likely to have more general content, which is less friendly to advertising network. On the other hand, blogs usually have a narrow topic on which all the articles are centered.
  
• Independent website is much harder to optimize given the huge workload of an entire site, whereas with a blog you simply need to care about your articles, domain name, and some titles naming.
  
• You have do all on your own for your own website, whereas blogs usually have a lot tools or widgets for you to take advantage of.

In brief, it's very important to think twice before we decide to build an independent website at a certain moment. I made a lot of mistakes in the past because of blind website obsession. I sincerely hope, after reading this article,  you my dear friends, and I as well, could do a better job in future when we need to make a decision on when to build our own websites.