CMS (content management system)

A CMS keeps content apart from design. Editors work in forms: a title field, a body, an image, a list of related items. Each entry is stored in a collection, such as blog posts, case studies or products, and a template decides how every entry in that collection looks. Add a case study and its page exists, styled and linked, without anyone touching the layout.

Around that sit the tools that let a team publish safely. WordPress, the best-known CMS, has six built-in roles, and its Contributor can write a post without being able to publish it. It keeps a revision of every saved draft and update, so versions can be compared and restored. Webflow and Framer build a CMS into a visual website builder, with collections that can reference one another.

The CMS decides who can change the site without a developer. Pick one the marketing team cannot use and every new page or edited headline joins an engineering queue. Pick one with a loose content model and editors rebuild the hierarchy on every page, so the site slowly drifts out of shape. The content model also limits what the site can do later: related products, filtered lists and translated pages all depend on fields that exist.

Before the work is priced, we list what your team must change without a developer. That decides whether a CMS is part of the build, and on a coded site it adds to the figure; websites start from $15,000.

Where there is one, the content model comes first: the collections, their fields and the links between them, tested against your longest and messiest real entries, with a rule for what happens when a field is empty. Then come the templates for recurring content, training and written notes for the people who will maintain it, and checks of redirects, metadata and forms at launch. This site has no CMS. It runs on Nuxt, its content lives in the code, and our developers publish it.

Say a robotics company publishes a case study every month, and each one names a customer, an industry, the products used and a result. In the CMS that becomes a Case studies collection with a reference field pointing to Products and an option field for Industry. The marketing lead fills in one form. The case study gets its own page, appears on its industry page and is listed on every product page it references. Nobody opens the design.