Content Management Systems (CMS)

Content Management Systems (CMS) are becoming increasingly popular for managing today’s large and complex websites. The actual content of the website is held in a database; MySql is very popular relational database choice as it is free and is often supplied as part of a web hosting package. The content is retrieved from the database and packaged into web pages can be highly customized by using templates and style sheets (CSS). From the user viewpoint the site looks like normal pages.

Content Management Systems let website owners concentrate on the information in the site without worrying about detail such as creating pages in the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). Many large websites, particularly anything interactive such as new sites, blogs and forums are driven by CMS. Complex sites that have specific requirements will write their own software but many off-the-self packages, both free and commercial, are available. These are often written in the PHP or Perl programming language. As with MySql these two computer languages are free and frequently come as an integral part of web hosting packages. Search engine can spider Perl, PHP, ASP. Net, Cold fusion, Python and Java amongst other language the most popular Content Management Systems.

Just as the standard look and feel of a CMS will not suit most websites they are also poorly optimized for search engines straight out of the box. The focus of CMS designers is information delivery to human users not search engine robots. There are a number of customizations that make Content Management Systems more search engine friendly.