Choosing the right website content management solution for you

What CMS is best for you

Many website content management system (CMS) solutions have evolved into robust, feature-rich and free/affordable online publishing systems. But they are not all the same, in fact, many aren't even playing in the same game. Choosing the right CMS by considering your current and future business requirements will ensure the solution you pick will serve you well for a long time.

What's right for your business?

  • Will it be intuitive and easy to use by website management?
  • Will there be design and development restrictions?
  • Will you need to be a developer to make it work?
  • will it be scalable to meet your future business requirements?
  • Will the platform and technology you choose be supported into the future?
  • Will it be secure?

The Trade-offs

As similar as the end product may be, there will usually be some kind of trade-off over the competing CMS solutions - these trade-offs are worth investigating.

Successful CMS websites

The success of your CMS website depends on a lot of different variables. Unless you have a technical staff to support it, you may want a stable, secure solution that simply manages the content, not the CMS process itself.

Unless you need a complicated app or process development, you may want to stay clear of CMS solutions like Joomla and Drupal, they may be considerably more than you need. Wordpress will get you up and be running in almost no time at all, but customization requirements could be cost-prohibitive. ExpressionEngine site development will take a little longer to implement, but it's basically free of the CMS constraints and allows for total design and development freedom (and as of November it is free open source).

Commenting is not available in this channel entry.