In the old days, people use to always create static web pages. Now a CMS can help you - find out more in this article.

What I mean by this is they used to either use a text editor like Notepad, or a website tool like Dreamweaver or Frontpage, and they would create the web page manually on their desktop computer. Then when the page was finished, they would upload it to their website by FTP.

This is fraught with difficulties. For instance, you need to make sure that each page looks the same - this means remembering to use a standard template. Also, it is very easy to make a formatting mistake and not realise it until the page is uploaded. Then you have to fix it and re-upload it again.

Also, if you want to write a lot of content and then stagger how it appears on the website over time, you need to upload it each day or two days or whatever, yourself. So if you go on vacation then you can't do this.

The answer is a CMS. CMS means "content management system". There are many CMSs out there such as Joomla, Drupal, Dot Net Nuke and Wordpress.

The great thing about CMSs is they allow you to "skin" your site or apply a common template. Many of these are open source so you don't even need to design them. Then when you want to enter your content such as articles, there is normally an option to do this and you just fill in the blank boxes that it needs from you.

Publish your changes and you can see immediately your content on the site. You don't need to update site maps or internal links - the CMS handles all of that for you.

As you can see, CMSs are great. If you want to experiment with one then I would head over to wordpress.com where you can use one for free.

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