CM’s other aspect is the way it addresses your workflow.
Sure, it’s great to separate the design from the content, but CM wants to streamline how your designs get approved and onto the server.
CMS flow diagram:

Create a design in whatever tool/environment you’re comfortable with.
Once it’s tested and ready to go, you pass it to your manager or editor or boss or whoever okays your design.

If it’s approved, it’s sent on to the server.
If not, you get notes and it is sent back to you, all within the CM environment: no email, no voice mail, no printouts of your design with red ink and yellow sticky notes all over it.

The same process happens on the content side.
The end result is that even though it’s easier for content and design to publish, there are still strict controls as to what makes it to the live server.

Content Management (CM), for many reasons and in as many forms, represents a tidal shift in web design.
And as a designer, you will need to find your place within the new CM world.

Onward Specialization:

With CM, designers get to specialize a bit.
How many web designers moonlight in their organization as tech support, teachers, and troubleshooters for other people’s web pages?
Why do so many do this?

Because content experts add to the website via a WYSIWYG program they are not familiar with.
So designers, the experts in such matters, become internal support for this bit of workflow jury—rigging.

That’s money down the drain for an organization.
Designers should design: it’s what we’re good at.

With CM systems, the content experts add content in a more simplified manner.
Not through complex programs like FrontPage or GoLive, but through a simplified interface without all the design controls they don’t need.
(Often, CM interfaces are browser–based and have a learning curve closer to Notepad than Word.)

Content people can author a page, add metadata to the page for cataloging (commonly via XML), and edit existing pages.
Best of all, they are no longer burdened with distractions like Netscape 4.7 table issues or whether HTML tags are correctly nested or not.

When an end user requests a page, the server takes the content, adds it into your template, and serves it on the web.
Most CM systems allow you to design different templates for different browsers and serve the appropriate template based on the HTTP user agent info.
Some systems allow for advanced personalization or even multi-language versions.