Silicon Chisel

Very few business can get by without some kind of a web site. This has become a simple fact of the modern business world. But getting a web presence built can be a difficult and costly undertaking for the small business owner who may not be as technically savvy as a corporate type.

The most common approach taken to getting a site built is to hire a “web designer/webmaster,” often from the classifieds (such as craigslist.org). Unfortunately, and I hear this story a lot from people who become my clients, this usually goes badly. The percentage of people who claim they are “designers” versus those who have actual design skills is quite poor. Knowing how to use the tools does not necessarily mean someone knows how to create a good design. Anyone can paint a house, far fewer can paint a portrait. The same metaphor applies to web design.

Then there are secondary issues. For instance, since the work is billed hourly it is usually not done in the most efficient manner. This is a double-hit - first the client gets hit with the cost of doing this busywork the first time, and then it all needs to be undone if the site needs to be changed or moved. Some web designers also feel they can claim ownership of sites they build. Claiming design credit is not the same as having ownership of content.

Sometimes small businesses will see various scripts in use on other sites and ask that these be used on their own sites. The first step towards open-source adoptance. But here again, because the scripts are disconnected, only the webmaster who hooked it all together knows how to run the system. The business owner does not feel like he owns his own content.

The Open Source Solution

So why is ((open-source)) a solution for the small business?

First consider that an open-source content management system (CMS) is a self-contained entity. That is, there is one script, one control panel, and one database to interact with and maintain. These adminstrative control panels are now quite easy to use - anyone who can order a pizza online can run a CMS. This gives the small business owner control over his or her own content. The need to contact the webmaster every time a new article needs to be added or some item modified is removed. True, some people do not want to manage their own web sites. But for the most part anyone who has been through the “webmaster experience” once is looking for a way to “do it themselves” next time.

Another important thing that open-source systems buy for the small business owner is flexibility. The entire site can be given a new look by using a different theme. Theme customization can be done by a good web designer in a matter or days, or even hours. A fraction of what it takes to re-author a traditional site. This allows the small business to keep their site’s look and feel current with design trends without a huge cash outlay for design services. Most “template clubs” are under $100 for a year and those are usually 95% of what a site needs.

Flexibility also includes modularity. Open-source CMS are designed to allow new features - calendars, galleries, appointment forms, forums, etc. - to all be plugged in without requiring additional development or authoring. Worst case the site owner needs to add a menu item somewhere. And this task is just a web form, like everything else involved in the admin console of a CMS.

Going further down the flexibility track, since an open-source CMS keeps all the content, user accounts, calendar events, etc. in a database it becomes more or less a mechanical task of data conversion to move the entire site to a new framework, should that be desired. This is not a simple task, of course, but any web developer capable of deploying a CMS is more than likely capable of converting content from one system to another.

And since the content - the real value of any site - is in the database, it is easy to back-up and archive for safety. In these days of rampant hacking and server exploitation, this is an important issue. Most current CMS have a back-up module available, allowing the site owner to do his or her own back-ups of the data that comprises their site. Here again, the site owner is given more control of their own site.

Drawbacks

This all sounds great, but there must be a down side? And why isn’t everyone building sites this way if it is so great? Lets start with the drawbacks. There are really only three that deserve attention. One is that it requires a more complex hosting package to run a CMS-driven site. A traditional site just needs some space on a server and FTP access and that’s enough to host even a large site. CMS’s require mySQL and PHP, and in some cases the ability to change security settings in the Apache web server. However, since the cost of web hosting has dropped so radically in the last five years, one can usually find a hosting solution capable of running a CMS for little more than a standard “business hosting” web-page only package.

Next, a CMS is a structured content system. Some of the wild web page designs a person may see and want to emulate require a style of formatting which is anything but structured. So some kinds of site designs are simply impossible, or more trouble than they’re worth, on a CMS. For some kinds of businesses, this is a deal-killer; they want their site to look a certain way no matter what, and if the CMS is unable to produce that look and feel they do not want it.

The last drawback is that it does require finding a web designer who knows how to do this kind of work. There are far fewer web designers who have the skills than there are those who can use DreamWeaver or FrontPage. Developing a site with a CMS requires programming skills as well as design skills. Most “web designers” know the traditional tools and know how to install basic scripts into a traditional site. They can not deal with the programming logic required to develop or adapt components for a CMS, nor the abstract thinking needed to program a theme design. (”Themes” or “skins” in a CMS define the way it looks. These are actually small programs themselves which decide how the page should be arranged intp columns and blocks, and how to apply formatting elements.)

And the last drawback mentioned also answers the second question. The reason more sites are not built this way is largely that there are significantly more developers who design traditional sites. So the small business owner looking for a site to be built will likely not know they want a CMS driven site, and will not likely find a web designer capable of building one - or even asking if a CMS is desired.

The Investment

For a small business, deciding to go with an open-source CMS-based solution is an investment. A decision to run the company’s web presence from a CMS means committing to a content platform for several years to come. It means accepting the fact that this platform will likely be replaced by a newer and better one somewhere down the road due simply to the pace of development out on the Internet. And it also means making the investment in learning enough about one’s own site to administer it and add content to it.

The investment can also mean taking a little time to learn and explore the technology itself. I have had a number of clients self-educate themselves on the CMS I deployed for them, and within months they are asking for specific components to be installed or updated, sometimes within days of that component being announced on the development sites.

But there is always an investment in owning something beyond that of the actual purchase. When one buys a house, one is also accepting the responsibility of maintenance. When one rents an apartment, one is leaving that responsibility to someone else. The same parallel applies to a CMS site versus a webmaster-controlled site. If a small business pays a web designer/webmaster to build and operate their site, they are more or less renting their content. Someone else is actually publishing and maintaining it - someone else controls it. It is like renting an apartment.

With a CMS-driven site, the small business has paid someone to build a house for their online content. It is now the business owner’s job to fill it with life and maintain it. The web developer can be called back in to make changes or additions, and can even be the webmaster if the small business owner does not have the time to author content. But the difference is that the site owner does not need a webmaster once the site system is built.

Conclusions

Clearly an open-source CMS-driven site is not right for every small business. Some businesses are so small that a few pages is all that they need. In which case having a “friend who can build a site” is more than enough. But for a small business which needs to make frequent updates to their site, which needs to incorporate complex kinds of functionality, and which cannot afford the disruption to business of an unreliable webmaster, a CMS-based solution is a perfect match.

Yet even for the very-small business, there are now “lite” versions of content management systems which only require PHP. They do not need a database at all. And these offer similar features to their more robust counterparts without the higher hosting requirements

The first step towards investing in an open-source CMS-driven site is the knowledge that the option exists. Hopefully this article provides some of it.