Content sites are web sites which are full of content. The content is usually in the form of text, but of course you could include video or even audio content. It's just that the search engines are still reliant on text to know what a web site is about - although the introduction of tags has helped.

For the purposes we're discussing here, we're looking at theme-based content sites containing mostly text articles.

There are a number of ways to build a theme-based content site. The 'old' way is to use a web editor like DreamWeaver, SeaMonkey or Kompozer to create a new web page for each article, based on a template which stays the same from page to page. The 'new' way is to use a Content Management System, such as Joomla or Mambo.

A Content Management System (or 'CMS') has a number of advantages over 'static' HTML web pages

1. Because the CMS is based on a web server, you can edit your website from anywhere with Internet access.

2. CMS pages are dynamic - that is, they are stored in a database on the server and created 'on-the-fly' when they are accessed by a web browser. This opens the door for much more interactivity with the user. Systems like Facebook or HubPages would be virtually impossible with static HTML.

3. Because all CMS systems provide an initial 'out-of-the-box' framework, it's much easier and quicker to get a full-blown website 'up and running'.

WordPress is a blogging platform. Over the last few years, it's evolved into a fairly complete content management system, which is easier to understand than most of the 'proper' CMS's. With the thousands of plugins available, you can do pretty much anything you can think of.

A couple of years ago, some 'RSS To Blog' plugins became available. Some Internet marketers latched on to these as a great way to get frequently-updated content on their spam 'Made for Adsense' sites. The problem with this is that bloggers understandably don't like their content being used without their permission. Most blog content is copyright material, and using it on other sites is illegal.

The solution for those who want fresh content automatically posted to their blogs comes from the many article submission services. These services syndicate articles written by their members to article directories and publishers all around the web. Provided that the author's resource box and links remain intact, you are generally free to publish these articles on your site.

Find out more about automatically updated website content.