Designing for a CMS is very different than designing a static web site. The designer must consider things such as templates, dynamic information and what is possible or feasible within the chosen CMS framework. Today more than ever clients demand a flexible product that they have complete manageability over; rightfully so. Much like in print design— where you should talk to the printer before starting your design—you should become familiar with the chosen CMS before starting the web design.

CMS Influences Design

Some content management systems have few features out of the box, and if the designer isn’t lucky enough to have a developer on hand that may be all you can work with. If this is the case the designer should know what the CMS can and can’t do. A lot of CMS’s come with features like photo galleries, blogs etc. so these are all elements that need to be designed. It is too easy to neglect those and once the site is live and actually populated with content you will see elements with their default style. I believe with CMS attention to detail is even more important.

Design Influences CMS

At Norex we are incredibly privileged to have a robust, agile and talented group of developers, that developed their own open-source CMS, Dashboard Framework, which we use on nearly every web project. In our environment we are lucky enough to be able to run ideas past the developers and they can evaluate if it is something worth doing, and more often than not they whip up a custom solution. Some of these solutions are requested more and more and eventually they become a part of the CMS package. These developers are also always innovating and looking for ways to make it better. Being able to have conversations around this allows for an even more well rounded CMS that has form in mind as much as function.

Moving Forward

Modern web projects are to the point where a CMS is almost required, so it is vital to the success of the design and project as a whole to consider this as early as possible. There are plenty of great open-source CMS’s out there— the majority of them with the ability to add on features quite easily.