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Steve and I are just back from visiting a two very different clients. Funnily enough they're located on diagonally opposite corners of a major intersection here in town and they're almost completely opposite one another in a variety of other aspects too ... except for one ... they both want a website.

One offers professional services to their clients. They need a website that is informative and immediately encourages people to trust them. It needs to look professional and it needs to be very easy to navigate. It won't need to be updated all that often and when it does the client will have us do the updates for them.

The other client provides mechanical services and the client wants the site to show potential customers that the business has the expertise to handle any job big or small. The client also sells a variety of equipment so the site has to be able to handle frequent updates by the client's staff.

Obviously the first site is going to be built in straight HTML ... I was thinking of building it into a content management system but one look from Steve was enough to change my mind. It's not that Steve hates content management systems ... it's just that he still feels that a straight HTML site is far easier to optimize for the search engines than any content management system he has yet come across.

He also has a problem working with the backend of a content management system and feels that it just doesn't give him enough freedom with the site design.

Just as obviously the second site will be built into a content management system ... in fact we're already in the process of setting it up using Joomla and the visit today was simply to tie up a few loose ends. When a client wants to update a site themselves then a content management system really is the only option ... well it's the only option if they don't have any HTML skills.

But there are times when even a content management system is not going to work all that well and this is probably one of those times. Sure it will build the site ... and build it quite quickly ... but once it's finished I'm going to have to teach someone who can barely use a computer how to update the site.

It's not something I'm looking forward to and it got me wondering whether content management systems are what anyone here in adult should be using to build their sites.

On the one hand you really don't need to have much ... if any ... understanding of HTML. The content management system ... if it's a good one (and I have seen one or two real shockers) ... will handle all that for you as well as build a style sheet too. Inserting images and banners is quite simple and adding links is a breeze.

But on the other hand sometimes the backend ... the place where you do all the work ... can be a little hard to deal with and I do understand where Steve is coming from when he feels that he's missing out on flexibility because I find it hard to be creative with site design when I'm using a content management system.

Of course whoever updates the site doesn't have to be creative ... they just need to understand how to use the backend and the back ends of most content management systems aren't all that easy to use.

And then there's HTML ... once you know how to write HTML or how to use a HTML editor producing a web page is relatively easy ... it's easy to update the content and if you built your site with an external style sheet then updating the style elements on the site is an absolute breeze.

If you use HTML you also tend not to have many of the search engine hassles that you can run into if you choose to use a content management system and that can be very important. Obviously there are work-arounds for many of those hassles but why go to the trouble of incorporating all those work-arounds when you can avoid them completely by using HTML.

There are other issues too where straight HTML probably wins over a content management system. The amount of disk space that you take up on the server will be a lot smaller if you use HTML rather than a content management system to build your site. The upload time will be much shorter too because most content management systems take quite a while to upload.

You may think that you can overcome those two problems by building your free sites and galleries all on the one URL and that mean you only have to use one content management system to cover all your sites but then there's the issue of site design. If you do use a content management system then you're going to have to stick with the same design elements (including your header) on every site.

Now I think I had better stop comparing content management systems with straight HTML because the more I do the more I'm coming around to Steve's view and that's not what I wanted to do at all. Hopefully though I've given you something to think about if you're thinking about using a content management system to build your sites.