On several occasion a client would like to be able to modify the pages and add their content. This need may arise due to change in profile of the services offered or additional services. This may even be to a simple reason such as change in contact address.
A corporate website usually contains high quality images, the design is professionally done and the code is of high quality and perfectly validated before deploying. This is because the designer would have invested great amount of time performing verification of cross browser functionality as well as thoroughly testing the code behind various features. Overtime the company might decide to change fonts or few contents of certain sections in website.
A good corporate website is one which has been designed to incorporate CMS edit functionalities in such a way that they don’t interfere with design or cause change in page layout or visual aesthetics.
If the website is being developed, it must be designed in a way that its display style and layout are fixed, and then employing CMS should be considered. But proper care should be taken in the implementation of CMS if the editing control on the content of website is to be given to the client. It should be ensured that the client’s site should not go down within few days of going live due to editing functionality.
It is best to interact with the client and mutually decide on the set of section in the site that would be made editable. After the finalization of scope you should adhere to the agreement and conduct proper training sessions to teach the client on how to manage the content and format it. It is advisable to program few controls to verify the size of files and other such validations to remove the risk of undesired uploads.
Security issues should be of prime concern when enabling the content edition functionality because whatever client changes or modifies has direct impact on the display of the page. Proper code should be in place to check for cross site scripting or SQL injection threats. A good content management system is one which can withstand the efforts of hackers to modify the content of the website or hijack it.
Content management functionality should be restricted to a set of users and proper authentication should be in place. It would be better if a process is managed to authorize or approve the change in content by an administrator.