Dwight Watt - Newspaper Article #221 10/9/2013

WordPress is a program used to create web pages. WordPress and several other programs including Joomla are called Content Management Systems or CMS.

Content Management Systems (CMS) have your basic web pages already built and you can choose several different designs called templates. The person in charge of the website just has to put in the content.

It is much easier to manage and update the content and this can be assigned to different people to manage the content on different pages in a web site which makes it work better to staying up to date.

You do not need to know HTML to use CMS, but if you do it gives you more ability to make the pages look special.

WordPress was an early CMS and is used by many. It was really designed as a way to put blogs (sites where people post their comments or thoughts on different subjects) on the Internet easily, but has evolved in being a way many create and manage their websites. Most people doing blogs now are going to use preconfigured blog locations like Google provides at www.blogspot.com Many hosting services include WordPress.

Joomla is a free CMS and can be installed at your website host. It is freeware.

I recently used WordPress to create a new website for a church in Swainsboro Georgia and it is an easy way for me to keep their list of events updated by just going in the event management page and updating the information for events and it automatically removes events when the date passes. You can look at the two different sites I did at www.swainsborcalvary.org and www.swainsborofumc.org

Content Management Systems make managing web sites easier for the average Internet user.