A content management system (CMS) supports the creation, management, distribution, publishing, and discovery of corporate information. It covers the complete lifecycle of the pages on your site, from providing simple tools to create the content, through to publishing, and finally to archiving. It also provides the ability to manage the structure of the site, the appearance of the published pages, and the navigation provided to the users.

A CMS allows you to effectively manage and maintain your website without requiring any html or technical skills. Content and Images are stored in a database and are loaded when a user requests a page. Authors of a website simply need to log into the website via their browser and use the range of tools available to add and edit content. If you want a website that you can easily edit from anywhere in the world then you should seriously consider using a Content Management System.

More than just a buzzword, content management solutions (a very broad category of software) help to fill the gap between building the site and keeping the site's content current. Individuals or businesses that contract to have a web site built are usually focused on getting the site up and running. They forget to take into account that once the site is up, they need to maintain the information contained within that site. Can you imagine a news site that has articles and events from two months ago? Or a cosmology site that still claims the Earth is at the center of the universe? As funny (or incredulous) as these examples are, sites such as this do exist (although I think that most cosmologists would agree that the Earth is not the center of the universe). The problem is that once the site is built and its creators have gone, content owners typically don't have the skills to maintain the site. Further, WYSIWYG tools like FrontPage or DreamWeaver often carry a learning curve that most business users don't want to tackle, and that may even be harmful to the site design. (I'm sure that the developers in the audience can probably think of an example where an inexperienced user hurt the design with one of these tools.)

Content management starts with the idea that two different groups of people will be working on a site; we'll call them site builders and content contributors. The site builders represent the various disciplines that are required to build the structure, navigation, user experience, and so on. The content contributors are charged with the responsibility of "publishing" the raw information. Content management solutions bridge the gap between these two camps by allowing site builders to create the "templates," within which the content contributors place the "substance."