In the old days, building a website was so much easier. You learned how to write html, learned how to embed images, learned how to link one page to another, and you built your site. The result was a set of pages that probably didn't take very long to create and that delivered quickly from the web server to your computer.
As sites grew in size and complexity, the limitations of the plain html page approach became manifest. If you wanted all of your pages to look like each other, you needed to make the site have a common set of html tags. So you would build one page that looked right and then paste that basic html code into every new page. That worked OK until you came to add more pages, and more pages, and most of all when you decided to make some changes or fix a bug in your code. You see, you had to go and visit every single page on your site and make the fix on each of them. Not much of a problem in a small site, but a maintenance nightmare on larger sites.
So people started to look at ways to create the framework or template for a page in such a way that the content was stored separately and the page assembled when it was required into the template. This was the genesis of the content management system (CMS).
Here's what a good CMS should do for you:
We have been using a variety of CMS programs over the years and increasingly have been looking to use SilverStripe as it not only meets all of the requirements above, it also provides a great environment for development and an active community of developers.
We started with an idea for a new design. We wanted to achieve a block effect on the main landing pages, allowing us to put an introductory paragraph in a block as a lead-in to an article elsewhere on the site. This would allow us to have a regular turnover of new items on the landing pages and a stock of articles that we could work on separately (as I am doing here!) and that could be seen in their entirety separate from the landing page.