CMS
Content Management System
In short
A CMS is the software used to maintain a website's content without touching code: change text, swap an image, add a page. It separates content from presentation, so the same announcement appears in the same layout everywhere. The benefit only materialises once somebody inside the business actually uses it.
What the choice depends on
Not the feature list — they all have one. It depends on three questions: who maintains the content, how often, and what happens when that person leaves.
A system nobody operates costs more than one that does less. The classic mis-purchase in a Swiss SME is a heavyweight platform for a business that adds one reference a year — and rings the agency every time, because the handling never becomes familiar.
The mistake we see most
Believing the CMS decides visibility. It does not. Load time, structure and content decide, and any of those can be done well or badly in almost any system. Switching platforms to rank better leaves the cause exactly where it was.
What the CMS genuinely affects is how easily you can maintain a sitemap, clean addresses and redirects. That is the quiet half, and you notice it during a migration.
The effort nobody budgets for
Updates. A CMS is software reachable from the internet, and known holes get scanned for automatically. An installation untouched for a year is not dormant, it is open.
That is also where a statutory duty bites: wherever the site takes in personal data — a contact form is enough — appropriate technical and organisational measures are owed (Art. 8 FADP, SR 235.1). Updates are not optional extras.
How we handle it
We pick the system around the person who will operate it, and take the updates on as part of maintenance. How a site gets built: website development.
The question to settle first is not «which CMS is best» but «who changes the text on your home page, and when did they last do it».
Related terms
A term in your quote that nobody explained?
In a strategy call we translate the offer in front of you — even when it did not come from us.