Get exclusive CAP network offers from top brands

View CAP Offers

Using CMS’s for your site

[bsa_pro_ad_space id=2]
  • This topic is empty.
Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 29 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • #603922
    KamielM
    Member

    Having been a member of the forum for a few weeks now, it seems that new and regular updated content is the key to a succesful site.

    With this in mind, I’ve been thinking about using a CMS (such as Mambo or Joomla) to put a site together as it would help me update content quicker than static HTML.

    However, is there a downside to using CMS? I guess I’m thinking primarily in terms of SEO as most CMS’s don’t display content in a fully resolved URL (ie, there are lots of ‘&’ and ‘?’ in the URL of a piece of content), which I understand isn’t great for SEO. Similiarly, a CMS won’t allow me to create a traditional directory structure. Will that be a simliar henderance in getting my site into the top 10 of Google?

    Am I right in my concerns? Would you/do you use a CMS and if so, which one? Are there downsides to CMS’s that I haven’t thought about yet?

    Thanks loads for your help

    #742826
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    Hey There,

    I personally believe that given you take the correct measures to make your system “SEO friendly” you will only gain from using CMS.

    Let’s review the “Downsides”:
    1) Non SEO friendly URL’s – search engines generally dislike parameters such as ?pid=DSDA&sid=dsdasda. Can be solved using “MOD Rewrites” which make the “front” layer URLS anything you want them to be from .html, .PHP or without a suffix at all if you want. You can also sprinkle your keywords and category names in there, for example xxxhttp://www.whichpoker.com/beginners-guide/poker-rules is a CMS based site with “friendly” url’s.

    2)
    Design restrictions – Using a generic system such as wordpress, Joomla, PHPnuke will save you time but will generally define the way your site will look. As you have probably seen most wordpress sites like rather similar and are usually simple 2-3 column designs.

    Customization of different page elements takes time and programming knowledge. By elements I mean lists, changing images, Meta Data in the CMS and more.
    For most newbie’s using a “generic look” site and CMS is not a big problem and I can assure you from my experience you can reach good rankings anyway.

    The best way to customize AND use a CMS is building a customer made CMS to fit your designs. This is the only way we work with all our sites (you can use PHP, ASP, Java, CFM or any other server side language for this), problem is this takes time and money.

    3) Security – Many CMS’s have some security hazards and “cracks”. I think that using an open source popular CMS will help you avoid this and keep you in the loop of security updates, frequent new plug ins and so on.

    4) Directories, not a problem in a custom made CMS as you can make which ever tiers you want. (Bodog.com is a great example of this using JSP) , in simpler CMS’s you can also, WordPress allows you to create as many layers as you want and so do Drupal and some more.

    To summarize, In my opinion CMS is the only way to go. The advantages of having an easily updateable site overcome all possibly disadvantages.

    As for either going the custom made route or generic it really depends on your resources, budget and time frame. More details about your background and what you have in mind will make a recommendation easier.

    #742870
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    you could also use templates in dreamweaver. i created a couple templates and when i want to add content just slap it in there and upload. Also if something changes or U want to add a link to all your pages all you have to do is the one template and it updates all the pages for you….:hattip:

    #742877
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    Hello again,

    I personally would steer away from using any of these HTML generators. Proper HTML coding is one of the top 4 priorities of any SEO campaigns.
    All pages I have seen created in Frontpage or Dreamweaver usually have quite terrible coding.
    Plan out your site, “design” it using some graphics software like Visio and give it to a designer / HTML coder to create HTML templates. Later on fit a CMS on it and you are good to go.

    Just my two cents.

    Ory

    #742907
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    @weblight 131646 wrote:

    Hello again,

    I personally would steer away from using any of these HTML generators. Proper HTML coding is one of the top 4 priorities of any SEO campaigns.
    All pages I have seen created in Frontpage or Dreamweaver usually have quite terrible coding.
    Plan out your site, “design” it using some graphics software like Visio and give it to a designer / HTML coder to create HTML templates. Later on fit a CMS on it and you are good to go.

    Just my two cents.

    Ory

    not sure what type of dreamweaver your using? Many design companies use dreamweaver and I have built tons of websites in dreamweaver as i am a professional web designer. None of my sites get sandboxed and i seem to get good seo results. I guess you have to know what your doing…..

    #742917
    triplecrown
    Member

    @jmelwak 131682 wrote:

    not sure what type of dreamweaver your using? Many design companies use dreamweaver and I have built tons of websites in dreamweaver as i am a professional web designer. None of my sites get sandboxed and i seem to get good seo results. I guess you have to know what your doing…..

    Same here. Dreamweaver is fine. I code my own pages, and do so by looking at the split screen (code + design). I make sure it’s standard readable html. I’ve never had a problem OR heard of anyone who’s had a problem worth mentioning.

    I had to look up the term “CMS” to see what it was. Content Management System. Seems like it would be good for those who don’t know how to code. Powerful tool for many BUT I suspect it doesn’t allow the same level of flexibility as ASP & SQL. (or PHP for that matter)..

    Cheers!

    #742928
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    Stand corrected about Dreamweaver, actually asked my designers and they use it a lot. :hithead: . , So I imagine my comment should be limited to FrontPage and the likes.
    And yes… the flexibility server side languages offers makes them much more attractive the any static site in my opinion.

    #742929
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    @WagerX 131694 wrote:

    Same here. Dreamweaver is fine. I code my own pages, and do so by looking at the split screen (code + design). I make sure it’s standard readable html. I’ve never had a problem OR heard of anyone who’s had a problem worth mentioning.

    I had to look up the term “CMS” to see what it was. Content Management System. Seems like it would be good for those who don’t know how to code. Powerful tool for many BUT I suspect it doesn’t allow the same level of flexibility as ASP & SQL. (or PHP for that matter)..

    Cheers!

    CMS’s are not just for people that don’t know how to code but also for people with either many sites, a lot of updating or less qualified employees doing updates. For a home based webmaster with a handful of sites I would imagine static could work but using CMS’s will increase effectiveness by far. AS for the “non coder” part I agree in SOME cases but I can say that being code knowledgeable will just enhance the added bonus you gain from a generic or custom built CMS.

    We employ full time programmers to enhance and maintain our custom built CMS’s alongside designers to take care of the design side. It just allows us to work in a larger scale.

    #742939
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    Duh, theres no downsides in to it. As long as you go with a custom made cms
    system, your directory structure can be done exactly how you like, without any mod rewrite thingies and the same goes with everything else you are worried about.

    Look at my site. I build the cms system to that site myself with php. All the articles i post to my site go through the cms system. All the games, bonuses, top10 lists, menus, everything are done by the cms system. All i need to do is open the admin panel and choose what i want to add and where. It’s very simple, easy and automatic for the user. My system is not near to perfection, but it does it all. Every one of my pages is dynamic. For example, the points you can see in the top10 casinos are calculated by the cms system from various things like amount of games the casino have, support (flash,live,phone,email,us), bonuses (how many, how often, wager limits)…..

    However, building a cms system as large as mine takes some time and effort. I built mine in 3 months, but im lazy. It could be done in 1. Also the price tag that comes along with the custom cms system might be a little bit frightening for some people, but i assure you it will pay you back. Plus i built mine from the scratch, so another one with similar and possibly with less functions could be done in weeks or days :)

    There are many other positive things in these cms systems you might not see without taking a closer look, e.g., everytime i publish an article, game or review i have an option to add that to my RSS and even better, to ping the social bookmarking services to send their robots to check me out. I can also tag all of my articles for services like technorati.

    There is so much more in to this, but lets just say its like having a blog with the SEO advantages of a static website.

    After all of this hype, this might sound like a sales speak. Well it kind of is, it’s just that i dont know if i myself am willing to do this for anyone. Plus the price tag needs to be right, since im no indian fela and everything is expensive here. :D Let’s just say you could find some interesting details you could study more from this post and its all for free.

    I think i got more or less carried away from the subject with this post. sorry for that.
    P.M me if you wish to know more about my system or the concept of CMS.

    #742968
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    yea, Frontpage is something you DO NOT want to use!

    #743024
    triplecrown
    Member

    @weblight 131707 wrote:

    CMS’s are not just for people that don’t know how to code but also for people with either many sites, a lot of updating or less qualified employees doing updates. For a home based webmaster with a handful of sites I would imagine static could work but using CMS’s will increase effectiveness by far. AS for the “non coder” part I agree in SOME cases but I can say that being code knowledgeable will just enhance the added bonus you gain from a generic or custom built CMS.

    Since your post I’ve been looking at CMS’s and I definitely see your point. I realize I am spending a significant amount of time on coding, where my time could be spent on more productive conceptual work as opposed to mundane html coding.

    You’ve left me with something to think about.
    By the way, which platform do you use? Mambo? Drupal?

    Cheers!

    #743053
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    The biggest problem I have found with CMS systems is once you start adding your own content from a database.

    Once you start doing this, you typically have to write your own modules as adding php/asp/perl/etc coding to a basic CMS page is not possible (in most cases of CMS’ that I have tried.

    Because of this, I moved all my sites off of Mambo/Joomla/Drupal some time ago. I decided NOT to spend the time figuring out all the in’s and out’s of coding modules. With that said – I HAD created several Mambo mods so that I could bring my jackpots onto the main page… just didn’t want to keep coding more mods for each ‘thing’ I wanted to do.

    Now – I created my own CMS system which works much better for me. Plus I created some coding that will generate static pages for me when necessary from my database info.

    Not sure if that helps… But it is certainly something to think about when using a CMS.

    #743055
    supervince
    Member

    I use wordpress for a lot of websites. Its easy to use and completely customizable. There are a ton of free plugins out there to do almost anything you need to do and when I need something specific that I cant find a plugin for I just write my own plugin. It took me about 5 minutes to learn how to create custom wordpress plugins and widgets.

    #743549
    voodooman
    Member

    @weblight 131646 wrote:

    Hello again,

    I personally would steer away from using any of these HTML generators. Proper HTML coding is one of the top 4 priorities of any SEO campaigns.
    All pages I have seen created in Frontpage or Dreamweaver usually have quite terrible coding.
    Plan out your site, “design” it using some graphics software like Visio and give it to a designer / HTML coder to create HTML templates. Later on fit a CMS on it and you are good to go.

    Just my two cents.

    Ory

    I used SiteSpinner to create this site http://www.penguintrailerhire.co.za
    I rank in Googles top ten for the search term “trailer hire”
    I believe in the “Keep it simple, Stupid!” philosophy.

    #743558
    supervince
    Member

    @ixian 132449 wrote:

    I used SiteSpinner to create this site http://www.penguintrailerhire.co.za
    I rank in Googles top ten for the search term “trailer hire”
    I believe in the “Keep it simple, Stupid!” philosophy.

    The css is a mess. There was someone else on the forum whose css looked just like that. Cant remember who now but they didnt like it and I dont blame them. Using class names such as .fsx01 and id names such as #Oobj206 is just dumb because its not meaningful and makes it hard to find the right lines to edit when you need to make changes. Also the structure is completely jacked up. I’m not trying to mock your website so sorry if you take it that way. I just think those auto generators suck and you will never get the rankings that you could get if you learned to properly code and structure your layout yourself.

Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 29 total)