The Fall of Hand-Coded Websites and the Rise of CMS

Hand-coding is the traditional, some would say “old school”, method of building websites. Many years ago when people were first developing websites everything was done by coders, using what is called hand-coding. Complicated algorithms and formulas were the keys to making images and text come alive on the internet. Those that didn’t know how to do this had to hire coders to design websites for them, along with webmasters to update and manage the content and security.

As technology has improved content management systems have developed and improved along with them. A content management system is used to manage the complete content of a website. Joomla! used to be a very popular CMS specifically used to build websites. As CMS’s grew in popularity the top three that grew in popularity were Joomla!, Drupal and WordPress. Joomla! And Drupal both required more work to set up and configure and were not easily accessible by the novice computer user.

As more and more users began to try to set up websites on their own many found WordPress to be far easier to use and understand than the other CMS platforms. WordPress allows the novice web user to go in and create a site from scratch without knowing any code. Understanding code was the big barrier that kept many people from setting up their own websites in the past. With the developments in WordPress, you do not have to be a coder to set up a very professional and polished website.

Another advantage to WordPress sites, that makes them attractive to clients that hire out developers to set up their sites, is that WordPress can be managed by the client/company and not require hiring a webmaster. WordPress is easy to use and understand. If a client needs to make changes to the images on the site or to any of the text, including blog posts, it’s a matter of just logging in and going into the very easy to understand dashboard to do what they want.

WordPress also has the availability of thousands of plug-ins. Plug-ins are add-on features that WordPress users can use for different elements of their website. This can range from setting up forms to putting various items in the sidebar or even adding images. By using various plug-ins you can create many of the same features that people would typically hire a coder to do via custom coding. WordPress can be accessed by anyone that knows how to access the internet