Maintenance functions \u2013 whilst these are often automated, not infrequently they can go wrong and cause conflicts with other site functionality.\u00a0 This type of work requires technical evaluation before proceeding, or a broken website can easily be the result.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nSo it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
It really isn\u2019t 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n
Maintenance of content management systems<\/h3>\n
<\/p>\n
In the days before CMS, websites consisted of \u201cflat\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
A lot of this is automated but it isn\u2019t just a case of pressing a button and off you go \u2013 if you don\u2019t research the updates thoroughly, it\u2019s quite easy to break a website due to incompatibility. This often happens where website \u201cplugins\u201d (widgets used to enhance the core functionality) conflict with each other. \u00a0A 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.<\/p>\n
This doesn\u2019t 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 \u201cas required\u201d basis \u2013 if they don\u2019t and insist on you paying big retainer bills, you definitely need to look elsewhere.<\/p>\n
Summary<\/h3>\n
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.<\/p>\n
CMS also need regular maintenance to keep them secure and working properly \u2013 so you need to budget a reasonable amount of time for your designer to help you with this. Simply pressing \u201cupdate\u201d in the CMS admin console is a bit reckless and can break your site, so please don\u2019t do that!<\/p>\n
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<\/strong> or use the website contact form to make an enquiry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Why your website CMS isn\u2019t as simple to use as you might have been told These days, most websites use a content management system (CMS). For those who aren\u2019t familiar with the terminology, a CMS is a database and code …<\/p>\n
Understanding the Limitations of a Dental Website Content Management System (CMS)<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10110,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-content-management"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dental-media.co.uk\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dental-media.co.uk\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dental-media.co.uk\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dental-media.co.uk\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dental-media.co.uk\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11984"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.dental-media.co.uk\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11994,"href":"https:\/\/www.dental-media.co.uk\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11984\/revisions\/11994"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dental-media.co.uk\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dental-media.co.uk\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dental-media.co.uk\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dental-media.co.uk\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}