CMS stands for content management system, and is called a publishing tool in Norwegian.
CMS came about because many web developers saw the need for the customer to be able to make changes to the website themselves and produce new content without having to contact a web designer or paste code snippets. A website created using the CMS system gives you complete freedom to expand your website all on your own.
The first and most famous CMS system is Wordpress. Wordpress started by making it possible for everyone to be able to have a blog. They adopted a simple text editing system where one could write freely and had some styling choices such as different size of titles, text, color of text, embed links etc. Today, this system is often called WUSIWYG (What you see is what you get)
Today, Wordpress accounts for 62.5% of all web pages created with a CMS system.
There are many CMS systems, some are good, some are not. Today, most of them offer design templates, which can be customized according to your needs. Thus, anyone who wants to create a website can do without the assistance of a Web Designer.
Nevertheless, it can be beneficial to have some basic knowledge of how a website is built, with a view to getting it to work as well as possible. And I guess that's mainly where we Web designers come into play, as we can override features and styling using knowledge within various coding languages such as HTML, CSS, SCSS, PHP, etc. And we can also customize your website without using a design template.
We are also good to have when something has gone wrong.
Not every CMS system is equally user-friendly, therefore it is important to find what works best for you.
Therefore, I have landed on a couple of systems that make it easy for me to be able to develop your website so that it has the design you want, that it fulfills the purpose of why you need it and that it should be as easy as possible for you to manage it.
Every website consists of two things. Backend and Frontend.
The backend is what you and I see and where the magic happens, thats an administration area where everything that goes on the development and styling of the website is done.
Frontend is what everyone else sees that lands on the website when they search on Google.
It is not always that you get full access to the entire part of the Backend system. It could be for a number of reasons.
Most often it is for safety reasons, so that you should not accidentally be able to destroy something. You then get access to those features that go on easy editing of content such as images and text and being able to create new pages that all use the same template.
You decide for yourself how much control you want to have relative to the backend bit. If you have no knowledge of the web, it can be advantageous not to have the ability to accidentally do something wrong. If you know what you are doing, it is not a problem that you are in complete control of everything.
1. Wordpress
2. Webflow
3. Wix
4. Shoppify