Introduction:
Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress promise website control at your fingertips, but the reality is far more complex than many anticipate. While CMS platforms offer advantages, we often advise against their use for clients without robust IT skills. The convenience of real-time updates comes with a range of challenges that may outweigh the benefits.

CMS Advantages:

Convenience:
The ability to add or edit website pages in real time is a significant advantage, providing immediate control over updates.

Savings in Ongoing Developer Costs:
While CMS can potentially save costs in developer fees, the time spent managing the CMS could be better utilised in focusing on your social media audience and day-to-day business operations.

CMS Disadvantages:

Technical Expertise:
Given the limited scale of our business, dedicating time and resources to training our clients in such systems is not feasible. Even basic CMS systems demand IT skills and training, creating a learning curve that can be time-consuming and costly. Additionally, the responsibility to find and secure this training falls upon you.

Lack of theme choice:
Limited theme options can sometimes pose a challenge within CMS, as the available themes come with restricted customisation. While improvements have been made over the years, users are still confined to the pre-built options that may not quite reflect the look you desire.

Lack of Support:
CMS platforms require a more expensive form of hosting that should offer some form of support. You may be bound by their operating hours so do check to see what is available. If you don’t have any support, you will have to rely on open-source communities for support, leading to potential delays in problem resolution and the need to seek alternative solutions.

Errors and Mistakes:
Without a deep understanding of website architecture, users may inadvertently damage the site’s layout, risking a less professional and potentially embarrassing online presence. The time to put this right again will depend on whether you have paid extra to include back up and restore plugins. If not, you will have to commission a developer or your website host for assistance. This is likely to be costly and may not be immediate which is stressful and leaves your website broken to the public in the mean time.

Grammar and Spelling:
Maintaining correct grammar, spelling, and optimal keyword use is crucial for search engine visibility. CMS may lack the finesse of professional proofreading.

Image Resizing:
Incorrect image sizing can affect page layout and loading times. CMS platforms don’t usually address file size issues, potentially leading to either a broken looking layout and slow-loading websites. It is crucial you have image editing software or a suitable program available to you to assist with this.

Security:
Relying on third-party plugins exposes websites to security vulnerabilities. Regular updates and manual installations are required to counter potential cyber threats. Some hosting packages do not include automatic updates so you will need to log in and check the system regularly and carry out any installations and updates to the operating system, theme and plugins. This can be quite time consuming but imperative it is carried out regularly.

Ongoing Compatibility:
Themes, plugins, and widgets may not always be compatible with the latest platform updates, leading to additional costs for fixes or updates.

Search Engine Optimisation:
CMS struggles to match the SEO performance of handcrafted HTML sites, as search engines may not interpret CMS code as efficiently, potentially impacting rankings.

Time and Staff Costs:
Managing a CMS demands time, expertise, and staff resources. Outsourcing updates can be a cost-effective solution, eliminating the stress associated with maintenance tasks.

We can help with this aspect however! We at Websorceress offer a competitive PAYG plan from just £15 per half our, billed in 15 min increments thereafter together with an even more cost effective annual plan of just £360 for up to 2 hrs per month to take care of updates on your behalf, simply email over (or whatsapp) and we will take care of the content writing and image resizing etc. depending on the amount of work required, general updates are usually carried out the same day (if emailed before 3pm and subject to workload) but within 24 hrs otherwise.

Think of us as a low cost but efficient personal assistant you can commission when you please, with no contracts, tax, NI to pay – you don’t even have to provide office space, equipment or even serve us with coffee 🙂

Conclusion:

The allure of CMS platforms often masks the intricate challenges they present. In our experience, clients frequently regret opting for CMS without fully understanding the associated costs and complexities. We encourage viewing a website as a cost-effective business tool, and outsourcing updates to professionals ensures a clean, professional, and stress-free solution at a fraction of the cost of hiring an employee.

These platforms are designed to allow individuals to access and manage their website themselves. They are only ideal for clients with good IT skills, who need to regularly make updates. Whilst it has it’s positives, with the exception of our *online ecommerce shopping cart solution, we generally don’t recommend the use of CMS for our clients in general for the following reasons:

CMS Advantages;

Convenience….Possessing the ability to add or edit pages on your website yourself means you can control in real time when updates are made to your site.

Savings in Costs….This is debatable, while it is true that costs are incurred in paying your web developer, time is often better spent concentrating on the everyday running of the business.

CMS Disadvantages:

Technical Expertise….Even the most basic of CMS systems requires some IT skill and will certainly require some sort of training. This learning curve can only be developed by regular use with good support, which is time consuming and involves further costs.

Lack of Support….Due to the wide and varied range of CMS platforms available, we do not have the time or facility in house to offer such training or support. Most platforms are ‘open source’ where support is usually in the form of other users dedicating their own time to assist people via online forums. If you post a question and no solution is immediately forthcoming, you will need to spend time sourcing an alternative, by searching for online tutorials elsewhere or to pay your developer for their time to assist you.

Errors and Mistakes….Without the correct knowledge and understanding of the architecture of the website you could inadvertently alter the layout, resulting in a site that will look unsightly, that can be make worse in attempt to fix. Your website is your virtual shop window and anything less than functional, visually or technical, is unprofessional and potentially very embarrassing.

Grammar and Spelling….Correct grammar and spelling reflects professionalism and is imperative to usability. This, along with the good use of keywords, determines how easy your site is to read for search engines. Proof reading by your designer, ensures optimal professionalism, this simply cannot be achieved by a standard WYSIWYG editor.

Image Resizing….The importance of a correct image size in both dimension and quality cannot be stressed enough. The page layout is dependent on this and distortion can occur if not done correctly. Some platforms may shrink the display of images that are too large to fit a space, but they do not adjust the file size which if too heavy, will take an eternity to load, especially on a mobile phone. People will not wait around…  In addition, visual marketing techniques will be missed out, that are also applied by the developer.

Security….CMS systems rely on 3rd party plugin’s for functionality and visual interest (such as contact forms, social media widgets, calendar countdowns etc). Unless your plugin’s are from reputable sources (how can this be guaranteed?), by installing such, you are technically allowing access to the back end (code) of your website. Unfortunately this is like a back door invitation to cyber attackers who are free to inject malware and viruses onto your website and the server itself, which in turn will then infect the devices of your website visitors and customers. This can obviously be very detrimental to your business reputation and very damaging to your search engine ranking if your domain is reported for containing such. Unless security is built in, (seldom), for peace of mind you would really need to pay for a security app, incurring additional expense.

Security and Updates of the Platform and all Plugins are issued on a regular basis, requiring manual installation. Due to the constant bombardment of external security threats and general design bugs – platform and plug in updates are regularly released (at least every couple of weeks) which always require urgent action. You will be expected to routinely check for these, to backup your system, database and files, download the updates and install them yourself.

Ongoing Compatibility….You cannot guarantee the theme, plugins or widgets you paid for will work with the latest platform updates, in which case you would need to contact the author for a fix or for an update of the entire theme. This is very unlikely to be free of charge unless you have paid for support packages.

If a breach occurs and the server itself became infected, it is quite some task to clean and reinstall the system, website and database back to its original settings and unless you ritually back up your system on a daily basis, there will undoubtedly be some loss of data.

Search Engine Optimisation

How your site fares in today’s global market is directly related to how search engines ‘see’ and crawl your website. A CMS system can rarely compete with a handcrafted HTML site. Search engines do not see your website as you do, they trawl through the underlying code and unless it is in a language that they recognise, the website could get down-ranked or ignored completely. We know html has always been and indeed continues to be, the predominant universal programming language for creating web pages. The code is easy for search engines to read and crawl and is quick to load and all browsers support it.

Time and Staff Costs – Do you have the resources?

Running a business of any size is not an easy task. Admin is a large unpaid part of any organisation and you can’t do everything ‘effectively’ yourself without sacrifice. Have you really the time, expertise or inclination to log on and update your website, to edit, resize and clean up your images and to carefully read through your paragraphs of text to ensure they contain the correct keywords, are succinct, error free and portray the message intended? If the answer to most of these questions is no, then it means that you will need to pay an employee to do do these tasks, who may also require training. Not as cost effective as you may have first thought.

The most common misconception of web design is a lack of understanding of the level of preparation and work that is put into the development of a website. Not only in the visual part that can be seen, but within the underlying code. Without the proper training, experience and skill, so many things can go wrong: formatting errors, incorrect preparation of images, no image compression or tagging, incorrect sizing, displaying photographs of poor quality with no optimisation – all of which can reflect badly on our reputation when viewed by prospective clients.

Despite your best intentions, it can be false economy in paying for a CMS to be implemented, that you don’t have the resources; time, staff, skills and proper training to use effectively. 15 years of experience has shown that in 99% of cases, the client regrets the decision of a CMS site and ends up paying for website maintenance as well as having already incurred the additional aforementioned running costs. We want you to view your website as a cost effective tool for your business, one you are proud to show to your customers and clients, not something that is half-hearted or that has become nothing more than a loathsome burden.

Outsourcing your updates to us is cost effective (less than you think!) and removes the stress of the aforementioned points entirely.  You can rest assured that your updates will be clean, professional, done promptly and at a fraction of the cost of a an employee.

Read more about our web management service & costs below:

Outsourced Web Management Service

*Websorceress is partnered with EKM, one of the countries largest and fastest growing ecommerce provider.  We have extensively worked with their platform for a number of years and have found their system on the whole reliable, secure & relatively easy to use, with a huge selection of tutorials, a dedicated account manager and 7 day UK based support via telephone, ticket system and email.