Content Management System

What is a Content Management System?

A content management system (or CMS) is used to organize and facilitate collaborative digital content creation. Recently, the term has been associated with programs for managing the content of web sites.

Web content management (WCM) is also used to refer to these programs.

The modern content management system is a computerized tool born of less technical sources (address books, encyclopedias, rolodex, etc.).

The idea is to take information and organize it so that it's easily retrievable, updatable, and flexible in how it can be reformatted and retransmitted, and searchable.

Today's content management systems are elaborate software/database applications designed to store and process large amounts of complex information.

Any application which manages information could technically be considered a CMS, such as Help Desk software, Address/contact management systems, web blogs, etc.

However, a classic content management system is generally regarded as a framework of tools that are less application or data-specific.

A well-designed CMS should be like a computer: able to be "programmed" with different rules and perform different types of processes and manage different applications and related data.

1. Open the Word file in Microsoft Word, if possible.

Tip: If this is not possible, try opening it with Internet Explorer - sometimes this works!

2. Cut and paste every graphic from the file into an image-editing tool. Create a naming convention, (e.g. Page1-A.gif, Page1-B.gif etc) and name each one accordingly.

WARNING: DONT SAVE THE FILE YET!

3. Do File | Save As HTML. Name the file with an HTML extension, e.g. ProposalTemplate.html. Exit Word completely.

4. Re-open Word. Do File | Open and select the ProposalTemplate.html file.

5. Do File | Save and save with ProposalTemplate.html with a new Word .doc extension, e.g. ProposalTemplate2.doc.

TIP: This process of converting the Microsoft Word file into HTML and back into Word, removes all the unnecessary (i.e. corrupt) code in the file, and will significantly reduce the file size.