Websites have come a long way since I first started designing them back in 1996.  HTML has paved the way into dynamic web languages, allowing interactivity, animation, and user-generated content to be present in any website.  Many people nowadays request a Content Management System (CMS) so that they may administer the site after the web design company has finished it, without the frustration of having to learn HTML.  A CMS, for those of you who don’t know, is an online software application used to create, edit, manage, and publish content in an organized manner to a website.  There are as many Content Management Systems as there are web developers (well, perhaps not that many,) and each one has its features and failures. 

However, one that we here at Unleaded Software find extremely wonderful, useful, and versatile is ExpressionEngine. We design a lot of sites, and we’re often asked to incorporate a CMS into those sites.  Hands down, it’s ExpressionEngine (EE from now on) that is first to escape our lips.  EE’s simple back-end administration and ease of “skinning” make it the ideal solution for businesses big and small.  Let’s go through a little rundown of EE’s features. Don’t worry, I’ll try to make this as clear as possible:

Expression Engine is the signature product of EllisLab, a company that “make[s] stuff that enables people to be more successful on the web.” (In my humble opinion, they’ve achieved that goal).  EE is built on the PHP language, one of the strongest and most reliable computer scripting languages in existence. At EE’s core is extreme flexibility.  Instead of locking the designer/developer into a predetermined template of content areas, EE allows us to custom-build our own content fields, permitting us to develop our client’s website to the exact solution they’re looking for.  An example is probably the best way to show this: We have a client who runs a horse ranch.  On his website, he wanted to be able to show a listing of horses with pictures of each individual horse, as well as genealogy and the ability to display prices, if the horse was for sale.  He also wanted his ranch manager, who doesn't know HTML, to be able to update all of this information or add new horses.  With EE, we were able to create custom fields (i.e. a horse image field, pricing, horse parents, etc.) and then code the website to look exactly like the template our designer had created.  And no PHP was required on our part.  Instead of writing some silly code to pull information from the database with if/then statements, we just insert a little EE code, such as or to display the dynamic information!

Another great feature of EE is the extensive add-ons, either included with the software or available for download.  Each expansion, plugin, module, or extension (all considered add-ons) are tested and accepted into the official repository, so you know it will work with your EE installation.  Unlike other CMS or blog platforms that use unverified plugins and are not tested, EE insures that a plugin won’t destroy your data.  But should something happen to your software, EE has an excellent support system. And talk about membership management.  As the administrator of an EE site, you are able to restrict or grant access to different membership groups and fully customize what you’d like them to be able to perform in the back-end.  You are not limited to how many membership groups you can create or how varied their permissions are.

One last thing that makes EE stand apart from other Content Management Systems is the ability to manage multiple sites from one back-end.  As long as the sites you want to manage are on the same server, you’ll have the ability to easily switch between different sites and update content without a hitch.  And, believe it or not, each site can look extremely different. EE does cost money, though.  A lot of thought, time, blood, sweat, and tears has gone into the EE platform and honestly, at $250, it’s a steal.  With the amount of freedom EE gives you with your site, you’d thankfully fork over twice that amount.  From a top-notch web design firm who has designed and customized numerous Content Management Systems for hundreds of clients, we here at Unleaded Software  wholeheartedly recommend EE for our clients.  We even use EE on our personal sites!