CMS is the key to maintaining active Web sites

Recently, the group with which I take my foreign mission trips, and for which I'm a board member, wanted to make some changes to its Web site. It's not that the old site wasn't attractive and professional looking -- it was. But the executive director of the group was too dependent on others to make changes to the site. The site's designer had done a good job, as a favor to the ministry, but understandably couldn't drop his paid business every time the ministry needed to make some minor change.

It's a common mistake for businesses and non-profits looking for a presence on the Web. They outsource their web design but don't give any thought to how the web site will be maintained or updated as time goes on.

If they use a professional web designer, will he or she be available to make changes, and if so will that result in additional costs? Many non-profits think they can talk a student into designing a site for them, only to find out in a few months that the teenager has moved on and they have no way to make changes or improvements to the site.

In some cases, an out-of-date, poorly-maintained Web site can send a worse message than having no Web site at all. I've seen non-profit Web sites that still list board members from two or three years ago, or out-of-date contact information.

Best solution

The best solution is to use a Web site based on a content management system, or CMS. This means that the design elements of the site are fixed, but the actual content can be easily updated, without any knowledge of Web site design, HTML, CSS or PHP. People authorized to make changes to the site -- a list which can be as long or as short as you like -- log in with a username and password, and they can type the new content into a form. It's no more complicated than sending an e-mail message or updating your Facebook status.

For the foreign mission trip group, the solution was WordPress. WordPress is best known as blogging software, but increasingly people are turning to it as a free and easy-to-use content management system.

I have to make a distinction here between WordPress software -- which can be downloaded from the web site wordpress.org -- and WordPress's blog hosting service, which is located at the Web site wordpress.com. This discussion assumes that your business or non-profit has its own web site and is interested in using the software from wordpress.org to manage that Web site.

Access a must

The first step is to make sure that your Web host allows you to upload files to your site. This may be done through a "shell" or "control panel" web site that you log into, or it may be done using a system called FTP (short for file transfer protocol). In order to use FTP, you may need to download an FTP client like Filezilla (filezilla-project.org), and you must have the FTP username and password for uploading files to your Web site account. If you've previously outsourced your Web site work, you may need to track down your old web guru, professional or amateur, and get that information from them.

You must also make sure that your Web host is set up to allow users to create and use MySQL databases.

The WordPress.org site offers complete instructions for uploading WordPress to your site and setting up a database to work with it. But first, if your Web host has a "control panel" interface, take a close look at it. Some Web hosts have the latest version of WordPress, or some equivalent software, already uploaded and ready to install from the control panel.

WordPress comes with a default theme, which controls the appearance of the site, but that's pretty plain, and besides, it's used by numerous other sites. You'll probably want to find and download (and then upload to your Web site) a more-distinctive theme from the huge selection at the WordPress.org site, or else you might hire a Web designer to create a custom WordPress theme just for you, or to fine-tune one of the available themes. There are design elements called "widgets" which you can easily create and move around on a page. There are also plugins available to add even more features and functions to WordPress.

Change settings

Because WordPress started out as blogging software, the default settings for WordPress create a blog on the main page of the Web site. But if you don't want this, you can easily change those settings and create a different front page. You can move the blog to a secondary page, and use it as a way of displaying your organization's latest news and announcements, or you can ignore the blogging aspect of WordPress altogether and just use WordPress to manage the various pages of your site. In fact, that is what my foreign mission group is doing.

Once your site has been set up, it's easy to log in to your administrative dashboard and make changes to any page. You can create various user accounts. For example, a church could set up its Web site and give user accounts to the pastor, the youth director, the choir director, the Sunday School superintendent, the women's club president, and so on. Each one could update his or her own page as needed.

The key to using a content management system, of course, is making sure that the people who are authorized to log in and make changes actually do so, keeping the site fresh and up-to-date. WordPress is a useful tool, which makes it easier to update your site, but that's all it is -- a tool. It's useless if it gathers dust in the drawer.

--John I. Carney is city editor of the Times-Gazette and covers county government. He is also the author of the self-published novel "Soapstone." His personal Web site is lakeneuron.com.