Choosing the Right CMS (Content Management System) For Your Website
Choosing the right Content Management System for your website is one thing that should be done after careful consideration. I will love to hold you by the hand, let us get through with this.
WHAT IS A CMS?
Any website without content is like a bill board with nothing to show on it. Who wants to take a second look? That’s how important content is to your website. Your content is one thing and organizing and managing them is another. This is where a content management system comes in. Content Management System or CMS as it is popularly called is a tool you can use to manage all the contents you have or need to put on your website. CMS offer you the ability to put up contents on your site, easily, and as often as possible amongst many other things.
We live in a world with many people and choices so there will always be varieties. There are many CMS and no particular one is the king. Some CMS are open source while others are proprietary.
Open source vs. proprietary CMS
Open source CMS are not owned by any particular vendor, but developed by groups of enthusiastic website programmers and developers while proprietary CMS are owned by a particular company that deploys and manages it. Open source CMS are free (or almost free). It is built by passionate communities of website developers and you can make changes yourself as a developer. There are no vendor issues too. I will just quickly add that the rate of innovation to it is quite faster. The biggest CMSs like Joomla and Wordpress are open source, so I will just place preference to open source over the proprietary counterpart.
Serious clue from those I guess, so let us look at the consideration for choosing the right CMS. CONSIDERATIONS FOR CHOOSING A CMS
1. CORE FUNCTIONALITY — What should a CMS actually deliver to you?
A one-stop shopping mall can have all you ever need at home, but there are basic things you need. Those needs are why you went there in the first place. That’s the way CMSs are. They comes with a lot of capabilities, tools, plugins, features and more, that is enough to give you all you need done on your website, but my candid advise? Take a good look at these first:
• Ease of learning and using it, user friendliness and intuitive administrative interface.
• How good it works with third party systems.
• How Expandable and flexible is it? Does it have helpful plugins and options that make editing, optimizing and publishing your content relatively simple?
Big questions right? Answer them and you are on the right track.
2. THE EDITOR — how easy is it to edit your website?
A static, never-edited and updated website is more boring than looking into space. Every web developer or website owner always needs to do this. To be able to do this, you will need a CMS that offer you more tools to edit and update your site right there within the CMS without using any external software whatsoever. No hassles and long turns.
3. SCALABILITY — is it easily expandable?
Nothing is static. If there is, the world wide web is the very least. You will need to know how expandable your CMS is. CMSs with a strong community of users backing it offer a great scalability. This is because a lot of member web developers in the community will need to expand them to have many features and do many things that are not originally with the CMS. If the CMS is build on a great scalable platform. That is a huge thumbs-up and a yes for me.
4. CUSTOMIZATION — does it let you publish any type of content you need, just the way you need it?
No web designer or web developer will love to be limited by a CMS. That is why this is a very important feature. I want to be unique. I want to do my thing my way, I want to be able to publish any type of content using a CMS. If you are saying that to yourself right now, then you need to consider this seriously.
There could be many things to look at, but when it really comes to choosing the right CMS for your website. These are the most fundamental. I am sure you didn’t just get a clue.
