Cooking with CMS

Making a website isn’t as hard as it used to be, even if making a good website is as hard as it ever was.

The same can be said for cooking. The microwave made cooking a full meal possible for those who could previously only make toast. Sure the “TV Dinner” has been around for decades, but as someone who grew up during the 70s and ate a few back then, I can vouch for their epic failure in the taste department. Around the 90’s, someone discovered that having microwavable food that tastes good might be a good idea. Today, there are a few companies that offer food that actually tastes good when it comes out of the microwave.

That long winded introduction parallels the development of the Content Management System (CMS), even though the time line is compressed and takes place much closer to the present day. For those of you new to, or unfamiliar with web development, a CMS is an application you use to control how a website is displayed to visitors. Depending on the CMS, you can control everything from the text and images that appear on a page, to how people use and navigate through your website. It wasn’t always this way. Less than 10 years ago, most websites were coded by hand or made with an application that used ‘WYSIWYG‘ (pronounced Wis-ee-wig), which stands for What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get.

This enabled designers to see what they were designing as opposed to writing code and stopping to preview their work in a browser from time to time. One of the most commonly used applications for this was/is Dreamweaver from Macromedia (which was bought by Adobe in 2005). Back then, making changes to your website meant you had to use that application to make changes to the files and upload them to the server (the computer where your website actually lives and works from). This meant that you were very limited in where you could make changes from and more often than not, who could make the changes.

So what’s the connection to cooking? An exquisite meal at an upscale restaurant, prepared by a professional chef and his or her well-trained assistants, is difficult to replicate by yourself at home. It can be done, however, with the investment of time, the proper knowledge, ingredients and specialized equipment. A well-designed website, constructed by trained web developers working with designers, copy writers, photographers and input from the client, is also difficult to replicate at home, though it can be done…

So what microwavable food and the CMS have in common is they have made things easier for the do-it-yourself types to be fed or to be seen online (though probably not to be seen feeding themselves.. that’s not for amateurs). If all you’re looking for is a piece of lasagna and a simple blog, you don’t have to look any further than the frozen food section of your grocery store and blogger.com.

On the other hand, if you’re in the mood for Coquilles St. Jacques, canard a l’orange and cherry clafoutis, you should step away from the oven and go to a French restaurant. Likewise, if you need a website that reflects your business, can offer  different content to registered users and unregistered users, can field surveys or even support e-commerce, then you should step away from your computer, pick up your phone and call a professional web developer. With cooking, you can mess up your kitchen in private. With a CMS, you can mess up your website for the whole world to see.