CMS Content Management Systems (CMS) are computer applications in which allow a user to add, organize, edit, and delete content from a website often with little to no coding needed. Depending on the CMS used, a variety of features and plug-ins can entirely modify how the website is used. Content is maintained from a central interface, and while originally were often used to maintain blogs, it is now quite common to use CMS to run entire websites, where images, video, audio, code and text can all be stored and modified.
Why iLegal Solutions Needs a CMS As Leonard and I discussed, iLegal Solutions would soon like to move into the next phase of their website, adding Gift Economy to their website by updating posts to educate potential customers on each service iLegal Solutions provides. An excellent way to approach this would be by adding a blog post section, in which Leonard can easily add a new post about a different service whenever he would like. As Leonard has no previous background in web design or programming, it would be beneficial to use a CMS in which is targeted towards beginners, and has a user-friendly interface to navigate through. Furthermore, choosing an open-source option would allow for iLegal Solutions to benefit from the contributions of thousands of different developers. More importantly, as we do not have a large budget to work with, open-source CMS are free to install, and there are many free plugins, giving iLegal Solutions the ability to create content without expense.
Wordpress Wordpress is one of the largest Content Management Systems currently out there, designed for both programmers and beginners alike. Their copy does not use technical terms, and with such a large community, there are endless amounts of supporters, developers and contributors, ensuring there are forums all over the Internet with information or options to ask any questions you may have. Wordpress is completely customizable, giving the user complete control over the look and feel of their CMS. Built using PHP and MySQL, it uses themes (whether customized or you are installing one of their many options) to present design. It’s backend administrator interface is easy to navigate, making editing a page or uploading images as simple as a few clicks.
Open Source Wordpress is an open source project, meaning it is free, to install and use yourself. This makes building onto your website extremely cost-effective, as there is no need to hire a web designer to build these added features into your website. Open source also means that it has hundreds of people from all over the world working on it to constantly create updates and better versions for you to use, every day.
Plug-ins From building an engaging blog, to tracking data through Google Analytics, or building a high traffic website that needs e-commerce, Wordpress has you covered. You have the flexibility to create and customize your website exactly how you see fit, and Wordpress provides all the tools you need to get there. With thousands of plug-ins and widgets available to you by a simple search, there are thousands plug-ins that other developers have built that by just installing, you have included in your website and it did not cost you a thing. Now something that would have potentially taken weeks to build and for a price, is easy as waiting for it to download and use immediately.
Competitors for Wordpress Drupal Drupal is another open-sourced CMS, in which is used to create websites and applications. Similar to Wordpress, Drupal makes it easy to manage content through its flexibility in customization, and also has plenty of modules and themes to modify functionality and design. Similar to Wordpress, being open-sourced means it has a very large online community, with hundreds of thousands of supporters contributing to it’s successes with updates and shared documentation every day. However, while Drupal does offer plenty of features, you must create custom features yourself. The features page is quite a bit more confusing to learn, and known more for people with a technical background, as opposed to beginners. Furthermore, while Drupal definitely does have a place in the market, Wordpress towers in popularity in comparison. Because of this, there is just simply more resources to learn from with Wordpress. Joomla! Joomla! Is another CMS option with advanced administration options and customizable features, giving the user full control of their site. With thousands of extensions available and over 50 million installations, Joomla! Has a large supportive online community, in which provide plenty of resources to learn from.
Initial installation and upgrades are easy to go through, with their “one click version update” feature, any skill level will be able to work through the most updated version of this CMS. With a media manager, contact form feature, built in smart search, and menu manager being only some of the core features, any skill level can easily build a fully functioning responsive website on their own. However, Joomla! Themes and extensions mostly require payment, meaning the more control the user wishes to have over their customization, they must pay for. This means Joomla! Simply is not the most cost effective option available.
Tutorial – How to Create a New Post with Written Content, and Appropriately Tag Each Post As it is important for your clients to understand exactly what type of legal help you can provide them with, a blog providing information about these services would greatly benefit your company. Below you will find a tutorial on how to create posts for your blog on Wordpress, and include images and text within each post. Furthermore, as services you offer fall under either Paralegal Services or Lawyer services, we will be able to tag each post so customers to your website will be able to see all posts at once of which fall under each category. 1. To begin, you will need to be on your dashboard page. As you can see on the left hand side, there are a variety of options for you to choose to get started. As we would like to specifically create a new post for your blog about services, click the ‘Posts’ option, then select ‘Add New’.
2. From here, you will be given a blank post in which you can enter in your information. At the top, it is important to include the title of your post, and in the box below, we can now write the information you’d like to provide within the post.
Above, ‘iLegal Solutions Services – Employment Law’ will now be the title of this particular post. In the larger box directly below, is where we enter our content. In the above example, you can see the second paragraph has been styled to be centered, and ‘Employment Law’ is now in bold. This is done by highlighting the particular text you would like to style, and clicking the desired button in the toolbar above. Circled, are the Bold and Centered icons. If hovered over, these icons will state exactly what type of styling they provide. The main text tool bar (from left to right) include: Bold, Italicize, Strikethrough, Bulleted list, Numbered list, Blockquotes, Horizontal Line, Align Left, Align Center, Align Right, Insert/Edit Link, Remove Link, Insert Read More Tag, and Toolbar Toggle.
3. Once you have added in the desired text, and styled it as you felt appropriate, we must include the post in the appropriate category and tag it. Categories allow for a grouping of post topics to be found under one page. This allows for a variety of posts to be found grouped together by a similar topic. Here, we would like to create posts about iLegal Solutions services that fall under two different categories: Paralegal Services and Lawyer Services. This can be done in the box on the right side, labeled ‘Categories.’ Click the ‘Add New Category’ button and a text box will appear. Type in what the desired category would be. Here, we would like Lawyer Services. Then, submit the button below ‘Add New Category.’ Here is an example below:
4. You can see the category has been added above, and is now checkmarked as being the category this topic will fall into. You can create an unlimited amount of categories, and check off as many as is appropriate for this post. Now that you are satisfied with the content in your post, and the category it falls under, we are ready to publish. We can do this by clicking the blue button found to the right side of the page labeled ‘Publish.’ 5. After this, you can click above the post where it says ‘view post.’ From here, you will be brought to the actual post page, in which is visible to all users. Below is the outcome of the previous steps:
