Users

Another area that’s helpful to consider is how a CMS system can help you to involve people in making a website. This requires involving more users.

Traditional HTML

In a traditional website, to involve more than one person, you’d need to create a new FTP account for them, such as FTP = file transfer protocol (see Figure 4.24).

Figure 4.24. Traditional sites require a lot of uploading and downloading.

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But in this situation, there are a lot of assumptions and significant room for error:

• If you have more than one person working on the site, you need to coordinate when they are uploading files, so that you don’t overwrite the wrong file.

• The assumption is that this person has to have enough technical knowledge to work with HTML and a program like Dreamweaver and an FTP program. It’s doable, but it takes time to learn.

• You need to make sure that people have every bit of code in exactly the right spot, or it can “break” the site.

So the basic reality is that with traditional websites, you end up having developers and content people, and they’re not necessarily the same people. So it becomes harder to involve people in collaborating on the site.

CMS Site

On the other hand, CMS systems are designed specifically to allow you to involve people easily, by adding new users, so that they can just log in and add content, without requiring technical skills. Step 1 is that you create the user (see Figure 4.25).

Figure 4.25. Users are easier to manage in a CMS-based site.

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And then you can decide what level of access that user has. For example, in a traditional site, unless you carefully restrict FTP access to certain folders, any user could delete or alter the entire site. But in a CMS-based site, you can allow people to do only what you want them to do, as shown in see Figure 4.26.