To get technical (skip this paragraph if you don’t want to get technical) when we build your site, we design and build the page templates, and separately we design and build the CMS, and then we do some clever stuff that allows the two to come together when you view them on a computer.
So, the main reason we build sites that use a CMS is that it gives you, the client, much more freedom about the content of your site - you have access to the CMS, and using it you can change the words and images that appear on the site. That means that if you want to update your address details, you don’t need to call us - you just amend them yourselves. This is very valuable because it means that you can update the site constantly - adding news, blog content, services, products, and information about your clients and projects. And the best bit is that you don’t have to pay us every time you want to make a change to your website.
You have total control about the content of the site - the words and images, the page structure, and sometimes even the navigation. Basically, anything that isn’t defined in the page templates. If you know there are elements you’ll want to change in future, make sure you write them into the brief so that we can make sure the CMS we build for you meets your needs.
It means you have to write your own content, or get a copy-writer to write it - in general we’ll expect you to upload the content to your site when we’ve built the test version, before it goes live. We do this for a good reason - it means you take ownership of the site and practice using the CMS, which you’ll need to do whenever you want to make changes to the site in the future. But if you really don’t want to devote time to inputting content to your site, we can quote you for transferring the data from your current site, or inputting it ourselves.
One thing you need to bear in mind is that because your website isn’t a physical thing, it doesn’t really ‘exist’ in one place, so there isn’t a ‘version’ of the site that we can give you if you decide to move elsewhere. Of course we’ll be able to give you all the content from the site, and the artwork for the page templates, but there isn’t anywhere that the two things exist together, apart from in cyberspace.
The other thing to remember is that you’ll continue to pay an annual fee for the license to use the CMS. This will be detailed in the proposal you receive from us. We think it’s a small price to pay for having the freedom to control the content of your own site.
© tictoc Family Ltd 2008