Content. Management. System.

Separately, these three nouns don’t mean much, but when combined, they can mean cost-, time-, and sanity savings for you and your business.

Admittedly, as a digital marketer with a media buying and planning background, I don’t get to manipulate the website design and maintenance side of marketing campaigns very often … okay, not at all. That was until I came to work for LeapFrog Interactive, where, upon the implementation of content management systems, they turned little ol’ me into a content management system queen!

To be clear, the type of content management system I’m referring to is an application or set of applications that simplifies the process of publishing content to websites and mobile devices. The best part is you don’t have to spend countless hours learning code and banging your head against the wall in order to manage it.

My introduction to these systems made three things very clear: a CMS saves time, it saves energy, and it saves money. As one of my astute colleagues points out, a CMS is most beneficial to companies who want complete control and who don't have time to mess around with coding every time changes need to be made to their website.

When there are multiple authors located in different places, publishing massive amounts of content on a regular basis is still extremely straightforward and quick. Other perks include quality assurance controls that allow you to control who creates, modifies, and publishes content so you don’t have a publishing free-for-all on your hands. In addition, a CMS can be set up so there is a template format for each entry (i.e., meta data, content, classifications, navigation), making it more efficient to post content.

[Contributed by Emily Carroll]

In the 1990s, businesses and individuals were becoming interested in getting their messages online and building websites, which typically involved contacting a developer to code and create the site. When changes needed to be made, the customer would have to contact the developer again and request those changes.

As the web industry boomed and more businesses wanted sites, these change requests became increasingly more common and more expensive. The 2009 recession caused many companies to revisit budgets and spending. It became clear that companies wanted to do more of the work themselves to avoid paying for site changes, so in came the Content Management System (CMS).

Many different CMSs have developed through the years; while some companies have been using them for nearly a decade, just recently they have become a necessity for small to medium-sized businesses. There are now a plethora of great out-of-the-box solutions that are highly customizable for web developers for various business types.

Once a web company sets up a CMS, the customer has the ability to log in and customize his or her site without the additional change order or fee. This structure also gives smaller businesses a chance to have a site set up more cost efficiently because they populate all of the content. Updates can also happen on the fly from digital devices like phones and tablets as well as personal computers.

The website needs of budget-conscious companies are being filled by using a CMS. Development firms and agencies need to focus on helping their customers help themselves, and businesses should look to their digital marketing agency to help identify the best CMS strategy to meet their needs.

A Content Management System (CMS) can be a valuable resource for a brand to have at its disposal when management of its website becomes a complicated prospect. However, there is a time and place to invest in one.  Some brands may not have websites large or complicated enough to warrant the control that a CMS provides.  How can you determine if it's the right time for your company to move forward and invest in a CMS? Here are a few signs that you're ready for a CMS.

• Your website has grown to the point where it has a large number pages and the content on these pages is frequently updated.
• Your website is growing steadily with the addition of large volumes of new content.
• Your marketing team owns the website but content changes must be requested through your IT department, which has proven to be a challenge in the past.
• Your site is very large, and its many different sections are owned by many different groups within your organization.  As a result, each of these sections has its own look and feel.  Rather than seeming as if it was created by several different companies, you want your website to have a unified appearance and have all of its sections share the same branding.
• Your website's administration is being handled by several people, each making changes to only parts of the site rather than the website as a whole.

If any of these scenarios apply to you, it may be time to make room in your budget for a CMS.

As the buzz begins to slow on Apple's iPhone, we're hearing renewed rumors of the long-awaited "gPhone" from Google. While the rumors vary from source to source, there are a few consistencies, one of which is that a mobile device from Google would heavily utilize open source technologies and would most likely run on a version of Linux.

As recently as 2004, business bloggers such as Jeffrey Veen were still skeptical about the viability of open source technologies for enterprise-class business applications. Now, just three years later, it seems nearly everyone, including the Google Guys, is willing to stake their capital on open source.

The August 27, 2007 issue of eWeek, features a cover story relating how another LeapFrog, the toy manufacturer, is increasingly employing open-source solutions in their products.

Last year, when we began looking at developing our own enterprise-class Content Management System, we considered every option, including developing from scratch. We've got a terrific crew of talented programmers, so we knew that we had the capability to build a powerful solution from the ground up. However, we finally decided to build our LeapFrog Editing and Publishing Framework (L.E.A.P. Framework, for short) on the open source Drupal framework. The headstart provided by starting from a robust and stable codebase allowed us to both develop the finished CMS rapidly and cost-effectively, and also resulted in a more polished end product.

Our clients have been extremely pleased with the L.E.A.P. Framework, and it's now been tested in some fairly aggressive use environments, proving capable of scaling well at a global level across multiple languages.

Open source technologies have made an impact on the global business environment. As more and more businesses turn to open source as at least a beginning point for application development, rapid deployment of more new and helpful consumer applications such as the gPhone are sure to follow.