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Here is a real-world problem. Your business or government agency or non-profit organization employs three or four people writing code or administering systems. You've used a home-grown system of scripts to manage most of your website pages until now but that system's shortcomings are growing more obvious. You want to manage your website better, so you decide to choose one of the 3,000 full-blooded web-content management systems now available: Zope, Midgard, RedDot, PostNuke, Microsoft CMS, OpenCMS, OpenACS, OpenEveryOtherDamnThing.

But, before you make that choice, ask the question: do you actually need a full-blooded content management system?

Most people assume they do. They've read the literature, which talks about the importance of having detailed workflow's, sophisticated built-in version control and "dynamic" pages generated on demand, straight out of a database on a live web server. This may be an excellent solution if:

• Your content management solution uses Python and PostgreSQL (or TCL and Oracle, or Perl and XML/XSLT, or on and on) and your technical team understands those tools.
• Your organization and IT team are happy to invest the time needed to maintain all the server processes.
• Your business needs to serve large amounts of dynamic data.
• Your hardware and software can make those dynamic pages without slowing down the site.

But there is a second alternative: find the content management system that does the most to take care of itself, and then, most of the time, let it take care of itself. Depending on your business, that solution will probably involve serving static pages wherever you can get away with it, reserving Java/ASP/Perl/PHP code for the places where you really need it, and not worrying too much about fancy workflow's. Here are three ways to make this simpler solution work:

• ASPs (application service providers) have carved out a niche in the content management game - you send your content to their servers using a web browser interface, where it is churned out through your design templates into static pages. You can see the best of the ASPs - AtomzPublish, CrownPeak Advantage and SurfMap's iUpload - reviewed at. But with prices starting at US$10,000 a year, these firms aren't being bowled over by demand.
• Brace yourself: you could edit your pages by hand. This sounds shockingly old-fashioned and for a while in the early 2000's everyone tried to pretend it didn't happen any more. But, as analysts such as Jupiter Research's Matthew Berk point out, it does. Indeed, a fair bit of hand-editing happens even inside some of the most expensive web CMS's. Macromedia has recognized this reality and produced Contribute, essentially a cheap and effective tool for managing and controlling hand-editing of pages - especially those created in the company's class-leading Dreamweaver page-design product.
• Last and most significantly, IT-Expert on Call is featuring a polished CMS Windows-only product. IT-Expert on Call's recommended CMS solution takes a similar approach to the ASPs, except that the content management happens on your local or mobile system [Desktop|mobile-Laptop] and most of your money stays in your pocket — and Setting it up takes about 120 seconds of non-technical time. When you want to publish [updated pages] its so ridiculously simple via the built-in FTP module that interfaces auto-magically with your server area, which you might own or might rent. The IT-Expert on Call's recommended CMS approach may sound as backward as hand-editing to anyone who has followed the rise of "dynamic" sites over the past decade. But, in practice, IT-Expert on Call's recommended CMS solution polish makes most other site development tools feel down-right crude - including those of six-and seven-digit-price CMS systems with browser interfaces.

Of the various static page solutions now available IT-Expert on Call's recommended CMS application approach offers today's best solution to the problem of keeping your annual web-content management bill down to a four-digit sum. But, whichever content management solution you choose, ask yourself if you really need or can afford the complication of today's supposedly "high-end" systems.

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