A CMS vs. Coding

Running a many different websites there are some things to choose from. One of the biggest is hand-coding everything or choosing a CMS that will work for your site. On ThinkComputers I hand code all of the review and article pages, where as on ThinkCE and ThinkGaming I use a CMS called Joomla. There are Pros and Cons to both. As you can see ThinkComputers looks alot better, most popular CMS’s do have alot of templates around but if you want something to look really good you have to do it yourself. Another big thing to think about is traffic. Most CMS’s use some type of database, usually MYSQL. So everytime someone is accessing your site it has the access the database. When you code everything all it has to do is read the page that is being accessed. I noticed a difference when ThinkComputers got slashdotted and when ThinkCE got slashdotted, ThinkComputers loaded much faster. Also I know when I hand code the pages for ThinkComputers everything is going to look how I want it, you may run into problems when trying to format things the right way on a CMS. Well it really sounds like I don’t like CMS’s, but I must because I use them for my sites. Well there alot of good things about CMS’s, the most important being the are EASY!! They have self installers so it takes no more than 5 minutes to install them. All of the pages are generated for you. On ThinkComputers everytime I post a new review I have to edit many pages, on a CMS’s it does it automatically. Also most CMS’s have text editors that easy allow you to enter plain text and it will turn that into HTML. There are also other cool things that CMS’s can do like tell you how many people are online, have a user registration system, and more. The best thing I like about CMS’s is that they save time. So when creating a site check out a CMS, all of my new site’s run on CMS’s and they work great. That does not count out coding it yourself, creativity is fun too!