Understanding the Limitations of a Dental Website Content Management System (CMS)

Why your website CMS isn’t as simple to use as you might have been told

These days, most websites use a content management system (CMS). For those who aren’t familiar with the terminology, a CMS is a database and code which sit behind the front-end of a website and allow control of content and styling. So in principle, you can control your website fully from the admin area of the CMS, a password-protected management portal which you can log in to from any web enabled device.

Sounds simple right? Well actually it’s not quite as simple as it may sound and you have to know how a CMS will help you before stepping in.

It’s fair to say that a few dentists we’ve worked with over the last few years were under the false impression that a website CMS operates just like desk-top software, for example PowerPoint, Keynote, InDesign and the like. These are all very powerful systems and allow inexperienced users to create complex presentations and designs with relative ease. “Drag and drop” features make the user interaction pretty painless and efficient and quite rapidly you can create something fairly noteworthy and professional-looking.

However, it’s somewhat different with a website CMS, simply because they are much less sophisticated than desk-top programs and consequently need a lot more skill and experience to operate, particularly for more complex tasks.

More than once we’ve taken ‘phone calls from a perplexed practice manager whose principle has asked them to create a new implants section or similar on the website and of course, they had no clue where to start!

The reality with CMS then is that you do need to know what you are doing if you are making any changes other than relatively simple ones on your dental practice website.

Here are a few examples of where a CMS can be useful for a typical user:

• Making straightforward text edits to web page content e.g. updating a staff biography
• Updating a fees table
• Adding a new team member – albeit please note that here you will need some experience in editing images to make them web friendly and also how to add new layout sections to an existing web page

Here are a few examples of where the average user typically won’t be able to produce a professional website result using their CMS:

• Adding a new page to the website including new layout and professional styling
• Making more complex changes to existing pages, e.g. adding new features such as image sliders, new content areas etc
• Technical changes e.g. adding features to improve SEO, user tracking etc.
• Maintenance functions – whilst these are often automated, not infrequently they can go wrong and cause conflicts with other site functionality.  This type of work requires technical evaluation before proceeding, or a broken website can easily be the result.

So it’s very important to understand where and how a CMS might be helpful and what is reasonable for you or your member of staff to reasonably expect to achieve.

It really isn’t the case that a dental practice principle should just assume that a team member can make professional changes to the website simply because it has a content management facility. More than once we’ve bailed out a practice manager where the principal inappropriately foisted that expectation upon them. Unfortunately it’s just not realistic – professional web design is highly skilled and not something that can simply be picked-up quickly and without some form of training.

Maintenance of content management systems

In the days before CMS, websites consisted of “flat” html and were inherently very secure. There was no database to hack or dynamic coding to exploit. This is not the case today unfortunately and CMS such as the very popular WordPress system need to be updated fairly regularly to remain secure.

A lot of this is automated but it isn’t just a case of pressing a button and off you go – if you don’t research the updates thoroughly, it’s quite easy to break a website due to incompatibility. This often happens where website “plugins” (widgets used to enhance the core functionality) conflict with each other.  A such you should expect to use your designer to complete these updates on your behalf as they will be able to make sure all elements will work as expected before the updates are done.

This doesn’t mean you need to subscribe to an expensive monthly maintenance retainer, on the contrary. These types of updates usually need 4 or 5 short maintenance interventions per year and your designer should be happy to do them on an “as required” basis – if they don’t and insist on you paying big retainer bills, you definitely need to look elsewhere.

Summary

Website content management systems (CMS) can be very useful but you need to understand their limitations, or perhaps more accurately, your own limitations on using them. For an average user they are great for making simple changes to a dental website without referring back to the designer. But for anything more complex, you are very possibly going to need some help.

CMS also need regular maintenance to keep them secure and working properly – so you need to budget a reasonable amount of time for your designer to help you with this. Simply pressing “update” in the CMS admin console is a bit reckless and can break your site, so please don’t do that!

If you are looking for help with an existing dental practice website or perhaps needs a complete new development or overhaul, then the team at Dental Media will be pleased to assist. Simply call us directly on 01332 672548 or use the website contact form to make an enquiry.