Content Control

CMS Development

A content management system lets your team update the website without touching code or paying a developer for every text change. Cibbster Designs builds lightweight custom content management systems, and also develops on WordPress when that is genuinely the right fit. The difference from an off-the-shelf install is scope: we make editable only the parts that actually change, which removes the plugin bloat and security exposure that comes with a general-purpose CMS.

Request a Quote

Starting from $3,500

The problem this solves

Either you cannot change a phone number without emailing your developer, or you have a WordPress install with thirty-one plugins, four of which have known vulnerabilities and none of which you remember installing.

Scope

What's included

Everything below is part of the engagement. Where something is genuinely optional, we say so in the quote rather than discovering it later.

  • Editable region planning

    We identify which content changes monthly and which has not changed in three years, then build editing only where it earns its keep.

  • Secure admin interface

    A clean dashboard your staff can actually use, with role-based permissions so the intern cannot delete the homepage.

  • Structured content types

    Services, team members, projects, locations, testimonials and posts as proper structured records — which also feeds your schema markup.

  • Media library & image handling

    Uploads are automatically resized, compressed and served in modern formats so a 12MB phone photo does not destroy your page speed.

  • Draft & preview workflow

    See changes before the public does, and roll back when someone pastes from Word.

  • SEO fields on every record

    Title, meta description, canonical and social image editable per page, with sensible auto-generated defaults.

  • Editor training

    A recorded walkthrough plus written documentation your team keeps.

How It Works

The process

  1. Content audit

    Inventory every page and field, and decide what needs to be editable.

  2. Model the content

    Design the content types and relationships so the structure still works when you have 200 records instead of 12.

  3. Build the admin

    Develop the editing interface and connect it to the front end.

  4. Migrate

    Move existing content in, preserving URLs and redirects so rankings survive.

  5. Train & hand over

    Walk your team through real edits on real content.

Questions

CMS Development FAQs

Should I use WordPress or a custom CMS?

Use WordPress if you publish frequently, need a large plugin ecosystem, or will hire staff who already know it. Use a custom CMS if you update a handful of sections occasionally and want a site with almost no maintenance burden or attack surface. Roughly two thirds of our small-business clients are better served by a custom CMS.

Is WordPress insecure?

WordPress core is reasonably secure and patched quickly. The risk is almost entirely in plugins and themes — abandoned code with known vulnerabilities is the single most common way small-business sites get compromised. A disciplined install with few plugins and managed updates is fine; the typical install is not.

Can you clean up our existing WordPress site?

Yes. We audit the plugin stack, remove what is unused, replace what is abandoned, patch what is outdated, fix the performance damage and put a managed update process in place. This is usually a fraction of the cost of a rebuild.

Will a CMS slow my website down?

Not if it is built correctly. Our custom CMS builds render cached static output, so the public site is as fast as a hand-coded page. Slow CMS sites are almost always slow because of plugin bloat and unoptimised images, not because of content management itself.

Works Well With

Web Design & Development

Cibbster Designs builds custom websites for small businesses, contractors and service companies in Lapeer County, Michigan and nationwide. Every site is hand-coded rather than assembled from a page builder, which keeps pages light, fast and fully under your control. A typical build covers strategy, design, development, accessibility, on-page SEO and launch, and takes four to eight weeks depending on page count. Builds start at $4,500 for a five-to-eight page business site, or $1,800 for a single-page or landing site, and rise with scope from there.

UI/UX Design • Brand Identity • Conversion Focus

Hosting & Maintenance

Managed hosting means somebody other than you is responsible for keeping the website online, patched, backed up and fast. Cibbster Designs hosts client sites on hardened cloud infrastructure with daily off-site backups, uptime monitoring, automatic SSL renewal and monthly security patching. Plans start at $149 per month, and unlike commodity shared hosting, when something breaks you reach the person who built your site.

Cloud Hosting • Daily Backups • 24/7 Monitoring

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is the work of making your business the answer Google returns when a nearby customer searches for what you sell. For local service businesses that means three things: a properly optimised Google Business Profile, a technically clean website with correct structured data, and genuinely useful pages targeting the terms your customers actually type. Cibbster Designs handles all three, and increasingly optimises for AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews as well.

Local SEO • Schema Markup • AI Search
Ready to scale?

Ready to talk about cms development?

Tell us where you are now and what you need to happen. We will come back with scope, timeline and a fixed price — usually within two business days.

Start Your Project

Two minutes to fill in, and it comes straight to us.