Imagine you planned a beautiful new house and hired a company to build and furnish it to your specifications. The house was built, you moved in and everything was great for about a week. Then the beautiful house started to gather dirt and dust. And somehow that poster of Chunk doing the Truffle Shuffle no longer seemed like a smart, sophisticated choice.

Now imagine that the house was constructed so precariously that it could never be changed without professional help. In fact, you had to call the construction company back to do your dusting and replace that embarrassing poster. And you had to call them again six months later to rearrange the sitting room. This is what it’s like to own a website without a content management system (CMS).

I have a good friend in Michigan who’s helping a major health network recover from a bad web design experience. A year or two ago, they paid an outside firm to develop a series of complex websites for their hospitals and offices. Each website was a static page, no CMS. No one at the hospitals had the advanced training necessary to make even a simple change, so they had no power to control the websites. The health network has to pay expensive fees for the original company to come back and make changes. A lot of money and time is wasted.

As my friend told me this story, I couldn’t believe it. It’s positively un-American to build without a CMS. The people whose business depends on a website should have control over the website. When a solution exists to help website owners edit their own websites, it’s foolish for web designers to ignore this solution.

With a CMS, you’re empowered to make simple, necessary changes with no fuss and no extra charges to web designers after the fact. And if your web designer should ever leave the industry, you can easily turn to others who are familiar with CMS software for help. Common CMS software titles include WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. Some web companies also build their own custom CMS software.

If you’re looking to build a new website, or upgrade your current one, make sure you control it with a CMS. And ask if you can get training! Knowledge is truly power in this case, since what good is a tool if you don’t know how to use it? Here at Roundpeg, we build with WordPress and offer two hours of training with every project. It takes a little work to use a CMS, but it will save you precious resources. Your website is your property, protect your right to make your own edits.

Want to know more about small business web design and WordPress? Contact Roundpeg, an Indianapolis web design firm.