Church Website Ideas
  • Web Design
  • Web Content
  • Web Security
  • Web Traffic
  • Tools & Resources
  • Perspectives

Simple CMS: A Preview of a Simple CMS

By: Jesse Orndorff|Posted in: Tools & Resources

This is our first in a series of content management system previews. Church Website Ideas is taking time to highlight content management systems that we come across that might work for your church website. Today we take a look at Simple CMS, a basic but very powerful CMS that offers some unique features!

Overview

From the start, Simple CMS promises a few features that most designers and developers will love: it is fast, plugs into your existing site, no template system to learn, edit on-page content, and it’s insanely affordable.

Pricing

Simple CMS has a very simple pricing structure: Demo, Professional, and Business. The demo, is well, free, and a demo. It will allow you to setup a site, but that’s about it.

The Professional is only $7 a month, which includes all the CMS features, but it will also allow you to run multiple sites, re-brand the CMS, setup your domain name, and make SEO changes as well.

The Business plan, is $70 a month, and for that extra cash, you are adding dedicated phone support.

Best Church Option: The Professional Plan at $7 a month.

Installation & Setup

The real magic of Simple CMS is that you don’t have to install anything on your FTP server, configure any PHP files, or really do anything special. As part of the setup, you just point the CMS to your FTP, give it the login credentials, and you’re set.

The only other setup you need to do is define the content areas, which is simple a simple click and define process. Much easier than other CMS systems.

The Design

While at first glance, the design of Simple CMS is nothing amazing, but as you start to use the system, the real power starts to show. The design is based around a collection of blue hues and feels a little dated. I would love to seem them give it nice clean refresh, to really make me want to interact with it more.

Drawbacks

Since this is a simple CMS it lacks a few advance features that I would want for my church website. It would be nice if there were a audio manager, or shopping cart, or really anything extra. The way the CMS sits right now, I would still have to write my own PHP or use a 3rd-party plug-in to get more advanced features.

Best Feature

A huge benefit of Simple CMS is that it can be setup in minutes and that it plugs into your existing site. For me, as a designer and developer it is important that I don’t have to modify my code drastically to fit a CMS. Simple CMS does this brilliantly, all I had to do is point the site to my FTP, and then click on the areas that I want to define as editable. No more adding CMS specific code to my sites!

Conclusion

Simple CMS does exactly what it promises: a simple to setup and run content management system. It is a painless process to setup and get your design to work with Simple CMS. The design and interface could use some work, it feels a little dated, but is still useful.

I found myself wishing that more advance features would be available, such as a audio manager, or shopping cart (for donations), or some type of photo gallery feature.

Overall this is a good CMS for your basic church website. The price is right at only $7 a month, and I believe you can hand this CMS to anyone on your church staff to update. Which is reason enough to give Simple CMS a try.

No related posts found

July 7, 2015 Jesse Orndorff

About the author

Jesse Orndorff

Jesse Orndorff is a professional website designer from Seattle. Jesse is the founder of Glean, a church website design studio. He is also the owner of Bearded Design, a web development company that provides websites to small businesses.

← 4 New Twitter Tools for Your Church
Is Your Pastor Bad At Blogging? Try Tumblr! →

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment

Copyright © A Bright I Creative LLC | All Rights Reserved | Powered by Wordpress + Striking by KaptinLin
About Church Website Ideas | Revenue/Affiliate Disclosure
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. If you continue using the website, I'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Accept Reject Learn More
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled

Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.

Non-necessary

Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.

SAVE & ACCEPT