CHOOSING THE RIGHT CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

WEB CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

BEST CMS

Choosing the right Content Management System is crucial to the success of any company or business.

So if you need help in choosing the right Website CMS then you have found the right article.

Firstly you need to understand what a web content management system is and what it will do to help you with your proposed website.

A WMCS (WEB CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM) is designed to make website content writing, authoring, collaboration, administration and indexing much easier. By easier I mean they are supposed to remove the need for any skills or expertise in programming. But you still need to be trained on using the software to varying degrees depending on each WCMS.

So why would you need to use one of these Web Content Management Systems. Well that then takes me to the pros and cons of WCMS.

The Pros

Relatively low start up costs
templates and quick to build
Simple to use with little training
Easy customization and add ons
Access Control
Document Control
Great for workflow projects

What I say

Great for multiple authors and users,
Great for tracking and authorising version updates,
Great for writing lots of content, articles, blogs and social media plugins and creating online communities.
Only really comes into it's own if you have lots and lots of content and pages and users.
Great for finding and organizing content on large websites.

So on quick reflection I would say that WCMS are great for Newspaper style websites and big blog sites. Or website where you have multiple users, editors accessing a site that needs to have it's content publication controlled and documented

The Cons

Add ons, license, upgrades can become expensive,
Constant Software Updates and downloads,
Bad for SEO as will require additional training,
Slowdown caused by latency issues
Inherent SEO issues with some themes and designs
Can become unstable and require to much technical support.
Content Duplication Issues
Complexity of solving other errors and problems arising

What I say

With some CMSs you have to pay for each addition, say you want to add a widget or function, you have to pay for it and then some functions are not covered by your particular licence, then you have to upgrade to get that additional functionality,
Can become very slow if your not careful with the coding, plugins and site and page cache.
Some of the look up features are not liked by search engines and produce unfriendly urls.
Some are not user friendly and common functions are hidden behind lots of menus and sections,
Needs to be managed constantly,
Some are more complicated than just writing the coding yourself,
Some create more problems and issues than they solve.
You need to become an expert, which can be a lengthy process.

ARE ALL CMS SYSTEMS THE SAME?

ARE ALL WEB CMS SYSTEMS THE SAME

There are loads of content management system out there some are better than others and some I would just simply stay well away from. Most are just sheer overkill for a simple website such as this!

WordPress
What can I say about WordPress that makes it sound as though I like it?

Well you can design just about anything in it and I have seen some amazing stuff produced using Wordpress.

It is the most popular CMS for blogging and the most popular content management system used by web designers and beginners alike.

It has excellent in depth documentation to help all it's users.

Great community and help is always at hand in the forums.

WordPress has hundreds of plugins and themes to choose from.

What I don't like is I find it all a bit overkill if you only have a small website. Plugins don't alway work properly with other plugins and the design

Wordpress is not intuitive.

And you can end up running into many problems with some of the themes and plugins creating duplicate content. Read More >

Concrete5 - Horrid Support
Drupal - Good for Cloning
Joomla! - Expensive upgrades

Would I use any of them

Simple answer is No

Would I recommend any of them.

Yes but only if the intention is for someone to build a very large website. That has about a dozen users and lots of content being produced that needs to be managed and controlled, indexed and searched.
Has in house experts for that platform who can solve many of the inherent issues and problems.

At the end of the day if you are wanting to have someone else build you a simple website do it in HTML coding.

This will be much quicker in terms of overall site speed.

Much cheaper in terms of ongoing costs and maintenance.

And requires about the same amount of teaching or knowledge to make the basic changes that you are allowing people to make in a content management system.