Most drivers know the feeling: When your car breaks down, you’re at the mercy of the mechanic unless you spend the time and effort to learn how to fix it yourself.

It’s the same with a website: If you don’t know to put one together, you can’t update or change it yourself.

As long as there are cars, we’ll always need help repairing them. But not so with websites… thanks to content management systems (CMS).

This system is perfect for small businesses and professional practices who want to control their website content without forking over a ton of money to third parties.

I began looking into content management about a year ago, in response to a growing number of requests from clients who wanted to be able to update their websites without my help.

Until recently, CMS was the bailiwick of gargantuan developers; and as such, it came with an enormous pricetag. A deep-pocketed corporation could pay upwards of $100,000 for a website that could be updated by non-programmers. That’s no help for those of us trying to produce a website for a few hundred dollars.

But in the last few years, the cost of managing one’s own content has declined dramatically, thanks to the generous developers and programmers who gave us open source applications. These are programs whose architecture is available free of charge to everyone. Open source creates communities of users and experts who share their knowledge and experience.

In the area of web content management, the solution includes an administrative back end that makes changing a website’s content as simple as sending an email. The new CMS platforms also feature an easy-to-manage database system that can make the website interactive, with features such as message boards and e-commerce.

For several years, WordPress was an open source CMS platform used almost exclusively by bloggers. We’re now beginning to see that WordPress also provides a great content management system for all kinds of websites.

There are a ton of advantages to using WordPress:

• There are literally thousands of free templates (known as themes) available. Instead of creating new themes from scratch, a designer can now customize a template and come up with a more attractive and efficient website in less time.
• Likewise, thousands of free WordPress plugins allow websites to feature special functions on demand.
• The WordPress administrative section lets the website owner add or delete content, graphics and even pages or entire sections.
• You don’t need to know any programming or markup code to make these changes. WordPress includes an editor that works just like a word processor, and operational functions can be switched in a snap.
• WordPress includes the most flexible and intuitive blogging platform available.

In short, this system is perfect for small businesses and professional practices who want to be able to control the content of their websites without forking over a ton of money to third parties.

WebDreamSites can create a content management website for you — and show you how to use it — for just a few hundred dollars. Check out our home page for more information.