CMS vs HTML: Which One is Right for You?
There are a few different ways to approach building a website. From CMS to HTML editors and hand-coding, you might wonder which option fits your website needs. While there are benefits and pitfalls of each, it’s important to understand each method’s purpose in order to bring your ideas to life. Let’s take a look at a few of the differences in these website publishing options.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
A CMS is a website-building application like Wordpress, Squarespace, or Shopify. It is a great option for not only people with little to no web design experience, but for professional use as well. CMS is often user friendly and cost-effective as many website will offer free access as well as paid tiers users can choose according to their needs. The complex coding and programming typically done in hand-coding is simplified through these systems. There are also countless templates, widgets and integrations these platforms can provide with ease.
Inside a CMS, there are dashboards and tools for customization as well as content creation. The ease of use draws many types of customers, from bloggers to e-commerce and small businesses. There are often so many features at your fingertips in a CMS such as app integration and form builders, or even aesthetic choices like animations and page layouts.
You can insert your own code to customize templates and fill in any gaps, but users must be careful while writing and implementing these before inserting them into a robust template. For example, Wordpress uses a coding language called PHP which is then converted into an HTML file in order to host your website. Sometimes, CMS’s will not allow users to add their own code for this exact reason.
HTML
HTML is a coding language that stands for Hypertext Markup Language. Many individuals or companies may choose to use HTML editors like Dreamweaver or Frameworks, or maybe even hand-coding from scratch. These options are not very beginner-friendly for the everyday person, and require hiring a developer. However, creating a website from the ground up using HTML, CSS, and Javascript will provide a one of a kind result that can be customized in detail.
Hand coding a website is a lot more time consuming than a CMS. Many of the features provided in a CMS like themes, navigation bars, or widgets must be written and formatted in code using CSS and Javascript to ensure that the code written is then displayed correctly and functions. There are options and toolkits like BootstrapsCSS which provides copy-and-paste templates for features to help this process along.
HTML is also faster than some CMS websites. Take Wordpress and its server-specific language, PHP. When a website user accesses that site, their server has to process and convert PHP, which may cause longer loading times. There is much more control over a hand-coded site, as developers can create and ensure a responsive design that is already available in HTML, eliminating the conversion process on the the user end.
Conclusion
As you can see, these different web publishing methods have unique experiences and knowing what each can offer is a vital first step in creating a website. While there are many more features and challenges within each website publishing method, I hope this short introduction will help you to determine if either a CMS or hand-coding HTML will best serve your website.