A content management system (CMS) is a tool that can be installed within your website to make it easy for you to edit your own pages, text and graphics from any Internet-connected computer. A CMS means never having to pay your web designer to do simple updates. I’d like to explain why I think a CMS called WordPress is especially suitable for nonprofits.
Back in January I ran a workshop at LASA’s circuit rider conference for IT workers who help charities run websites. I asked what CMS they would give to a small voluntary organisation – there are hundreds of CMS on the market – and the general opinion was that WordPress is one of the best options. Why?
Firstly, WordPress is free. For cash-strapped charities, that’s obviously a good thing. However, a free product isn’t necessarily cost-effective in the long-term: what about the cost of installing it and the staff time spent learning to use it? Well, even if you have only a rudimentary knowledge of web design you could download WordPress from www.wordpress.org and install it on your own webspace within a couple of hours; if not you could pay a web designer to do it for you even quicker. You could even get a WordPress website hosted for free at www.wordpress.com, which will take just a few minutes to set up and which you could use to familiarise yourself with the system before installing it on your own webspace.
You won’t need to send yourself on a training course to learn how to use WordPress: it’s fairly intuitive, most people figure it out themselves and are confidently writing their website within a few hours. Having said that, if you plan to have several people writing content for your website or if you plan to have a large website, a short group training session might be advisable.
WordPress is open source. That means that any web developer can see WordPress’s underlying code and customise any part of it to their own needs. Plus when it’s installed within your website no-one can take it away from you. It’s a flexible, adaptable tool and it’s easy to find a web designers with experience of working with it.
As well as being a CMS, WordPress is also a blogging tool. You can publish news articles that are automatically archived by month and visitors so your visitors can search for them. Also, your visitors can subscribe to every news item you write using a very simple technology called RSS that’s built into Internet Explorer, Outlook 2007 and many other popular software these days. That makes WordPress a great choice for running campaigns and promotions.
I should point out that WordPress is only really an option for a brand new website or for a complete website rebuild; if you already have a well-established website then you might want to consider using cheap web content editing software such as Adobe Contribute instead.
WordPress isn’t the only CMS on the market: there are many other simple free and open source alternatives as well as some far more complex paid-for systems. On the ICT Hub Knowledgebase’s website at www.icthubknowledgebase.org.uk/managingcontent you’ll find find some good advice on choosing a CMS.
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