Content Management Systems, affectionately known as CMS's, have revolutionised the internet. The key to a good website is good content, and good content means up to date and fresh content. Without a CMS keeping content up to date and fresh is a hard and time consuming task. With a good CMS though, well, then you're looking at your website coming to life, interacting with your users, with little or no technical know how on your part. The best thing about many CMS's is (you're going to like this bit!) they're free!

That's right - not only are they are lot better than having expensive web design software on your computer that you don't know how to use, but CMS's are on the whole developed by the Open Source community which makes them free of charge to use just however you want! 

So what is a CMS?
Well, they do what they say on the tin to be honest - they are systems, which manage (wait for it...) content!!! Genius or what.

Managing your content means giving the ability to type stuff in direct to your website through a web browser, and then letting the CMS take control of it and display it nicely, accurately, at the right time. Yes, that's right - with a CMS behind your website you can type in content one day and tell it not to display it until a later date/ So for a church website publishing the small group notes, you can type them in one week, and have them set to display themselves only when they're needed the following week.

Astonishing isn't it. 

But what if you want to do more than just type in text for news stories? Easy peasy! If you want a discussion forum - install the add-on component for your CMS. If you want a shopping cart, install the add-on component for your CMS! If you want an all singing all dancing image gallery - yes, you've guessed it - install the add-on component for your CMS!