The Modern Building Blocks of Websites

We create websites to store, access, edit and publish content. It has been like this and it will stay just so, at least in the conceivable future. Hence, it should come as no surprise that the history of web design will stay inextricably tied to the evolution of content management systems (CMS).

With the proliferation of Cloud Computing and the leaps made by the IT industry to accommodate mobile devices into our lives and offices, you would expect content management systems to have evolved tremendously in the last decade. Unfortunately, as this article will imply, not very much has been recently accomplished in this field. We are, however, on the verge of a brave new era in content management. The digital world is about to fully go “modular!”

Given the complexity of websites and the lack of a standard model, a uniform definition of CMS and its constituent parts is challenging, but, when using a CMS, you should expect to benefit from the following minimum basic functions:

Since the early days of the internet, when fitting texts and images into one-column layouts was more than enough, we have gathered an impressive collection of distinct types of content. Each of them entails its own set of rules, from the information it should contain, to the way we need to showcase it.

However, one could argue that most of these content types have the same few framing attributes. For example, whitepapers, blog posts, case studies, and articles should all have an author, a title, body text, images, videos, and comments. So, why hassle over the few differences between content types?

Here is why: keep in mind that the main difference between various types of content, apart from their distinct uses, is that they all have specific graphic formats. Consequently, to accommodate this extended list of content types, we were forced to create more and more custom page templates.

Having more templates implies that more complexity needs to be added to the CMS. More often than not, the effort to adapt to all these formats results in less stability, poor scalability and, paradoxically, a decrease in overall adaptability. Most importantly, the creation and maintenance of numerous custom page templates will slow down production and will negatively impact the bottom line because it's not a very flexible concept.

By designing websites around page-oriented template concepts, we are forced to make important layout decisions long before most of the content is even created. By the time the content is ready for publishing, we usually want to change the layouts. Here comes more work, more tedious customization and less profit at the end of the quarter. Feel free to quote me on this one:

The urgency of a breakthrough in content management systems derives from the realization that business environments are evolving so rapidly and so unpredictably, that page-oriented template concepts are no longer going to cut it.

Any high-paced business environment will favor the companies that show adaptability. For this reason alone, being able to give website editors the power to customize content and layouts in place, without the help of programmers, is not only quite useful, but will actually prove crucial in the next few years. It will prove extremely efficient in terms of development, design, content management, ease of maintenance, and, most importantly, production costs.

I stated earlier that providing a uniform definition of CMS is challenging. It is, but here is what I am going with:

The goal of a Content Management System is to reduce or eliminate the interference of programmers in the management of websites, so users with no programming skills can create, customize and manage content with relative ease by using drag-and-drop.

The traditional building blocks of websites have been either custom or one-size-fits-all page templates, which is what traditional CMS such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal have been offering for years. However, to truly bring content management into the 21st century, we need to overcome the limitations of page-oriented template concepts.

The vehicle of change, needed to overcome these limitations, has turned out to be the widget. Widgets have been around for more than a decade, but they have always been viewed as add-ons, appendices to the fixed page templates. No more! Thanks to modular approaches to web design, widgets can easily become the constituent parts of the website, providing amazing scalability and full control over all digital endeavors.

A widget in Scrivito is a reusable page component, which an editor can insert and move around on the page using drag-and-drop. Any text can be edited in-place.

Practically, any function of a website or application can be obtained by using widgets.