Give your website a job to do
A company website earns its cost when it does a job: answers questions, filters leads, takes bookings. How to plan a site around the work it should do.
Do you actually need a CMS?
“We want to be able to change things ourselves” is one of the things we hear most often from clients, and it's a reasonable thing to want. A content management system does cost something, though, in money, maintenance and complexity, and on some websites nobody logs into it again after launch.
Patrik Beneš · Founder6 min read
What a CMS really gives you
A CMS (content management system) is the admin interface behind the website where you can edit texts, swap photos, add projects, publish articles or manage inquiries without touching code or calling a developer.
What you're really paying for is independence and speed. You can fix a typo at 10 pm, publish a new reference the day the project is finished or update prices without waiting for anyone.
You probably need one if…
- you regularly add new content such as projects, products, job offers, events or blog posts,
- prices, menus, opening hours or team members change several times a year,
- more than one person in the company should be able to update the site,
- you plan to grow the site with content for SEO,
- you receive inquiries and want to see them in one place, not scattered across inboxes.
You probably don't if…
- the site is a stable presentation that changes once or twice a year,
- nobody in the company has the time or interest to edit it,
- you'd rather send an email with “please change this” and have it done,
- it's a campaign or landing page with a limited lifespan.
In these cases a fast static site with a small maintenance arrangement is often cheaper and quicker, and it's more secure too. Without an admin login there's no login to hack, no plugins to update and nothing for anyone to break by accident.
Do the simple maths
Estimate how many changes you'll realistically make per year and what they would cost as paid developer time. Then compare it with what a CMS adds: the build itself, plus any licence or maintenance fees over a few years.
Example
If you expect five small edits a year, each taking a developer half an hour, paying for them as you go will almost always be cheaper than a CMS. If you'll publish a new project every month and adjust prices every quarter, a CMS pays for itself quickly, and you can make changes the moment you need them.
There's a hidden cost on the other side as well. Content often goes stale because asking someone to change it feels like a hassle, and visitors notice when information is out of date.
Right-size the CMS
If you do need one, the most common mistake is getting too much of it. A full page builder where you can change every margin and colour sounds flexible. In practice, we've seen carefully designed websites slowly fall apart that way.
A better approach is a CMS shaped around your content:
- clear fields for the things that actually change (texts, photos, services, references, team, prices),
- a few ready-made content blocks for new pages, already designed to fit the site,
- an overview of incoming inquiries,
- a short training session so your team knows its way around from the first day.
A well-designed CMS leaves out the options you'll never use, which makes the ones you need easy to find.
The middle path
You don't have to decide forever. A well-built site can start without a CMS and get one later, or start with a CMS limited to two or three sections and grow. The important thing is that the technical setup allows for it, so ask about this before the project starts.
If you want to compare the options in more detail, see WordPress, Webflow, Framer or headless: how to choose a CMS.
