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How Content Management Systems have evolved during the last ten years.

Back in time we had not many tools to create a website. And by saying back in time I mean so far back in time it felt like 1999 because it just was!
We used mundane stuff like notepad to edit HTML files – today I prefer notepad++ and professional tools like Visual Studio or Textmate.
In the early years website owners were closer to HTML code and often used to be HTML guns because they had to or they caused a lot of chaos because they didn’t know better…

Back in time - Updating a website was a long process.

A first step to the better good of web development were HTML-editors like Microsoft Frontpage(don’t!), Adobe GoLive(a imagemap and general nightmare!) or Homesite (which became Macromedias and then Adobe’s Dreamweaver and is still decent beside the design view). These tools had inbuilt HTML commands and code snippets ready to copy and paste so that one doesn’t have the need to look up every single bit in references like Netscape’s excellent but unfortunately discontinued DevEdge. Some even provided logic to locally store a whole site including navigation logic. You could update files local and then update your website via FTP upload.

It was a good first step towards a general right direction and still mostly a incredible cruel experience to shift one table cell and being forced to rewrite the whole code to get a fancy layout. And still it was a long way to real online collaboration and the pretentious Web 2.0 new light and easy Rich Internet Application world.

Not long after that or to be precise right at the same time the first self written CMS (Content Management Systems) were introduced, hand-crafted by uncounted numbers of web design agencies. And a website owner had three choices:

• Try and manage your website on your own
• Keep sending website updates to your agency of choice
• Spent some extra budget on one of those new fancy Content Management Systems so you can do changes yourself

And still most solutions were proprietary and as website owner you still had to use a plain text editor without any functions that for example Microsoft Word ‘97 had to offer. But still – you could change headlines and content text and sometimes even add 1 (one!) image. And because those were the only options available those websites were pretty unbreakable – But pretty boring too. No bold, italic or underline was possible with some lines of code. No image within text or individual template possible.

Today we’ve got highly scalable Content Management Systems based on .NET, Java, PHP or other programming languages. But the way we enter content is still the same. A text editor – but – plenty of features to change the appearance of content you enter. In addition to that a process like content approval, reviews and a design layer have been added and combined into a Content Management System.

How most websites work today when a Content Management System is in place.

Our job today is it to make sure that

• the system is unbreakable no matter what is entered
• content entry is easy
• entered content looks great and is accessible in the best way possible

What has changed for you in the last ten years?

Things became easier, communication happens faster and so do changes.
Things became better:

• You don’t have to sent tons of emails for content updates anymore
• Websites can easily be managed internally by your marketing department
• Content Management became easier
• License fee free Open Source software like WordPress has the capacities of Word ‘97 today
• No matter what content you enter, it looks neat.

And what is WYSIWYG?

“What you see is what you get” by definition should show you the content you enter, while you enter it, as it will appear on your website once you’ve published it. Here is a good example of one of our clients.

A website with WYSISWG-text editor inside the CMS and the published result

No more emails with Word docs, no more cryptic forms unrelated to your website layout just a world how it should be. This is by the way what we do here at Areeba..