First of all, it is important to clarify that both CMS and hand coding are the right ways to build a website. The question is which is the better way out. It depends on who is building the website and what type of website is required. There are certain websites you just cannot build with a CMS tool while some websites can be built perfectly and quickly with a CMS tool. In this article, we are going to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both of the ways of building a website and let you decide the best option for you.

Advantages of Hand Coding and CMS –

Hand Coding – It is the traditional way of building a website where you have to write code from scratch and code out everything from front-end to back-end development. You have to know the basic to advanced programming languages completely otherwise, you cannot build a website with hand coding as per your or your client’s requirement. It is needless to say that hand coding takes a lot more time in comparison to CMS and you can do anything you want with no restriction when you do hand coding.

The best part about manual coding is that you will have full control over what you are doing. You can create your own template, and you can use that on other projects. There are certain high paying projects available where you have to code manually to make the development because the requirements are different from usual. With hand coding, you have the ability to control everything, and therefore, you can use shortcut methods to boost the speed than you might not be able to do with a CMS. Moreover, adding more features in the future is also going to be easy.

On the contrary, if you are doing hand coding, you should be ready for hours of debugging. With a CMS tool, the chances of making mistakes are almost zero, and that is exactly why most of the beginners get used to CMS tool. However, due to lack of proper knowledge, they fail to make the bigger projects where the vast knowledge of web development technologies is required.

CMS Tool – CMS stands for the content management system. It is a tool to build a website from a basic structure it comes with. It makes uses of themes and templates that suitable your website category. These templates have a lot of inbuilt features that are usually present in the respective website niche. You can create a website without any technical knowledge. Therefore, you do not need to learn the programming languages beforehand, and if you have some basic knowledge, you can tweak things here and there. The tool is also user-friendly and totally uncomplicated in most of the cases.

There are many reasons why people use CMS over hand coding. The first reason is it is super convenient, and it is totally dragged and drop based development. There is no programming knowledge required and therefore, anyone who has used computer and browsers before, they can do it with ease. Moreover, there is no chance of errors as everything is being written in the background automatically by the tool and those code snippets are verified beforehand.

Moreover, the development time is minimal as there are dedicated templates available for different niches of websites. Not just that, multiple people can work on the same website quite effortlessly. Most importantly, some of the CMS tools let you edit the background coding to add new features and edit something on the template as per your requirements. However, some do have customization restrictions. Furthermore, the security issue can also bug you in the long run as you do not really know where the loopholes are.

Conclusion –

As you can see, there are distinct advantages in both the ways along with disadvantages. If you have very little idea about programming, you have no other option other than going for CMS. For general websites with no complications, you can go for CMS, but you need to involve a lot of third-party apps and plugins for new features that the template does not have provision for. However, if the website is something quite innovative in features, you have no option other than hand coding. This is because neither the available templates nor the plugins or third-party apps can help you in such advanced development.

The right way to building a website is to make use of both of them. You should use the CMS tool wherever applicable to get the basic things done quickly. Then where the CMS tool’s usage ends, you should go for hand coding to get the desired features. Therefore, as a website developer, you should have knowledge of using both to create a website as per your requirement.

Kitty Gupta
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