Content Managed Systems
Wikipedia gives a good general definition about what a CMS is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system
To be precise the type that we use here is a Web Content Management System or WCMS. WCMS is a powerful tool for publishing and sharing content over the Internet efficiently, and making it easy to keep up to date and manage. We are using the open source system called Drupal, we chose this as it is very modular: http://drupal.org/
Other popular systems include Joomla, Wordpress, vBulletin and Ektron, along with many others open source and proprietary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_systems
BuiltWith gives some interesting statistics about which CMS are used the most, and how many websites use CMS.
http://trends.builtwith.com/cms
Interestingly CMS is only used on 4.43% of the websites in Builtwith's most recent survey. This relatively low number is not surprising, since many websites are purpose built static pages which are not regularly updated, or serve other purposes where it's not really relevant. But there are also still leaves a lot of websites that could benefit from a CMS but have not set one up.
Blogs are a bit of a buzzword these days, in fact according to the Cnet story link below there's a new blog being born every half a second and that was in 2006! Blogging runs on a Content Management System. You've no doubt heard of twitter and it's mainstream popularity, this is a type of Blogging often called 'micro-blogging'. The second link also has some interesting blog trend stats with a hockey shaped curve that would impress Al Gore.
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1025_3-6102935.html
http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000436.html
That's an example of one of the things a CMS is good for, you can also use it for publishing stories, articles, pictures, recipes, just about anything you can think of! CMS can be useful for both businesses and for individuals and not for profit organisations. It provides a place on the web for people to keep upto date about what's happening, a place to communicate to your audience, a place to develop a network and collaborate.
If you setting up a CMS for the first time there are some fantastic open-source packages out there, this means you can essentially use them for free in accordance with their public license. If you have reasnoble skills in web development and have an appropriate hosting account you should be able to follow the guidance to get one up and running. Larger organisations may of course find benefits in more proprietary systems (ones you pay for).
So how could this help you if you run a business?
Well the main things are building your brand, getting your name out there, building a network, improving visibility, and generally being helpful. That's basically what we're looking to do ourselves with this. If we find some helpful or interesting information we think might be of interest we'll publish it here. This helps our business because we get in touch with other people that are interested in the stuff we are. It provides an efficient way to broadcast information to a large audience, and a place to manage resources. The cool thing is this is 2-way communication, we can get feedback and comments from you guys so we can work on keeping the quality of the information high, and focus on stuff that may be of interest. Giving away information may sound like a bit of a strange business model, but it has indirect benefits. Up to date content helps give a site a good ranking on search engines like Google, which further increases popularity, which is pretty important to a lot of businesses!
And it isn't just about being useful for business, a lot of these benefits are just as relevant for individuals, clubs, hobbys and interests, or not-for profit publishing.
The great thing is these tools are really quite mature technologies now and always getting easier to use and more versatile. If you have anything you wish to publish online and don't have a CMS, it's really worth a look.
