A CMS, short for content management system, is the part of a website that lets you change what is on it without touching code. You log in, change a price, an opening time or a photo, press publish, and the site shows it. The design, the layout and the technical side stay exactly where they were.
What does a CMS actually do?
It keeps two things apart: the content and the design.
Think of the chalkboard outside a café. Someone designed the board once: the frame, the size, where it stands. What is written on it changes every day. A CMS gives you the chalk, not a hammer for the frame. You can change the dish of the day as often as you like, and the board still looks like your board.
Behind the screen, every CMS has three parts:
- A store where the content lives: your texts, prices, photos and hours.
- An editor, the screen you log in to, where you change that content through forms and buttons.
- The website, which reads the content from the store and shows it inside the design.
When you press publish, the editor saves the new content and the website starts showing it.
Do I need a CMS?
It depends on how often your content changes, and on who you want to make the change.
| What changes | How often | Is a CMS worth it? |
|---|---|---|
| Dish of the day, menu prices | Daily or weekly | Yes |
| Promotions and events | Monthly | Yes |
| Opening hours and holiday closures | A few times a year | Yes, because a wrong time online costs you customers |
| About text, team photos | Once a year | Useful, not essential |
| A new page, a new layout | Rarely | No, that is a design job |
In my first job, changing a price on the menu was not something anyone in the building could do: it went to the IT department, and we waited. That is fine for a large chain. For a café that changes its dish of the day every morning, it is not.
If the honest answer is “almost nothing changes”, you may not need one at all. A small site that changes twice a year can be updated by whoever looks after it. If something changes every week, waiting for someone else to make the change gets old fast, and the site falls behind what is really happening in your business.
What kinds of CMS are there?
There are four broad kinds. None is right for everyone.
- An all-in-one CMS. You install it on your own hosting. Content, design and add-ons all live in the same system. It can do almost anything, but every theme and add-on needs updates, and someone has to keep up with them.
- A website builder with an editor built in. You rent the whole thing as a monthly subscription: the editor, the templates and the hosting. Easy to start; you stay on their platform for as long as the site exists.
- A headless CMS. The content is stored in one service and sent to a separately built website. Very flexible, and it always needs a developer.
- An editor made for one kind of site. It knows that a restaurant has a menu and a salon has services, and it only shows those fields. Fewer options, and much harder to break.
On Indica Online, the directory of Portuguese and Brazilian businesses in Belgium that I built, owners claim their listing and keep it up to date themselves through a short form. That is a CMS too, cut down to the handful of fields that matter.
The guide to builders, CMSs and custom builds compares these routes on cost, effort and ownership.
What should a good CMS let me do?
Whatever kind you use, these are the questions worth asking before you commit:
- Can I change content without breaking the design? You should be filling in fields, not moving boxes around.
- Can I see the change before my customers do? A preview of your own site, with the change in place.
- Can I undo a mistake? Before publishing and after.
- Does it work on my phone? Most changes happen between other jobs, not at a desk.
- Does it handle my languages? In Belgium a site often runs in two or three.
- Is the content mine? If you leave, can you take your texts and photos with you?
What a CMS does not do
A CMS is a tool for changing content. Some things it will not do for you:
- It does not make you rank on Google by itself. It can make good habits easy, like a proper page title, but search depends on much more. The guide to SEO explains what.
- It does not write the content. Clear, specific words about what you do, where and when still have to come from you.
- It does not replace maintenance. Hosting, security updates, backups and the domain still need someone looking after them. The guide to domain, hosting and email covers that side.
How does this work on an Ovrick site?
Every site I build is written as code for that business, not a theme with a different colour. That keeps it fast, and it means nobody can break the design by accident. Content changes are part of the two larger plans: Mission Control includes one hour a month and Boost two. You email me what to change and I change it. On Ground Control, a change is billed by the hour. The pricing page shows what each plan covers, and the process page explains how a site is built, step by step. Would you rather change your prices, menu and opening hours yourself? That is what Ovrick Cassini is for: the editor for your site, coming soon.