Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Adding CMS to Existing Web-Sites

Many of you are well aware of "Content Management Systems" or CMS for short. There are many off the shelf CMS solutions for FREE like WordPress and Joomla, however as powerful as they can be they don't always offer the turn key solution you may be looking for.

For companies with pre-existing custom web-site designs and layouts already online, it would be hard to simply populate one of these FREE CMS solutions with the same content and maintain the functionality of the web-site. However, it would be nice to be able to give access to several employees in an effort to maintain the web-site and keep content current.

Luckily for us web-site designers there is a solution from WebAssist. Their PowerCMS extension for Dreamweaver allows designers to dedicate areas within any PHP page that already exists as manageable content from within an online CMS admin application. This extension is part of their "Design Extender" suite for Dreamweaver. All that is required is a PHP page and a MySQL database. PowerCMS gives us the best of both worlds. Web-Site designers can provide clients with affordable content management for pre-existing web-sites while at the same time maintaining control of areas of the web-site that should not be handled by anyone without a web-design background.

If you are like me, you enjoy the freedom of creating your own web-site designs from scratch within dreamweaver. FREE CMS applications are great for content, but lack in creativity and design. PowerCMS allows you to keep your creativity without sacrificing the functionality that most clients are currently looking for.

You can learn more about PowerCMS online at WebAssist.com or contact us at Rood's Media and we can discuss how this unique CMS solution can be added to your existing web-site.