CMS stands for content management system, and is called a publishing tool in English.
CMS came about because many web developers saw the need for the customer to self-make changes to the website and produce new content without having to contact a web designer or paste code snippets. A website created in a CMS system gives you complete freedom to expand your website completely on your own.
The first and most famous CMS system is Wordpress. Wordpress started by enabling everyone to be able to have a blog. They adopted a simple text editing system where one could write freely and had certain styling choices such as different size of titles, text, color of text, posting links etc. Today, this system is often calledfor WUSIWYG (What you see is what you get)
Today, Wordpress accounts for 62.5% of all websites created with a CMS system.
There are many CMS system, some are good, some not. Today, most of them offer design templates, which can be customized to suit your needs. Thus, anyone who wants to create a website without the assistance of a Web designer can.
Nevertheless, it may be advantageous to have some basic knowledge of how a website is built, in terms of getting it as well functioning as possible. And that's probably mainly where we Web designers come into play, as we can override features and styling using knowledge within various coding languages such as HTML, CSS, SCSS, PHP etc. And we can also tailor your website without using a design template.
We are also good to have when something has gone wrong.
Not every CMS system is as user-friendly, therefore it is important to find what works best for you.
That's why I've landed on a couple of systems that make it easy for me to be able to develop your website so it gets the design you want, that it fills the purpose of why you need it and that it should be easiest for you to handle it.
Front end and backend
All websites consist of two things. Backend and Frontend.
Backend is what you and I see and where the magic happens, that's an administration area where everything that goes on the development and styling of the website is done.
Frontend is what everyone else sees that lands on the website when they search on Google.
It is not always that you get full access to the entire part of the Backend system. It can be for several reasons.
Most often it is for safety reasons, so that you should not accidentally be able to destroy anything. You can then access the features that go on easy editing of content such as images and text and being able to create new pages that all use the same template.
You decide for yourself how much control you want to have in relation to the backend bit. If you have no knowledge of the web, it may be advantageous not to have the ability to accidentally do something wrong. If you know what you're doing, it's no problem that you have full control over everything.
Known CMS system
1. Wordpress
2. Webflow
3. Wix
4. Shoppify