What bloody CMS do I need?!?!

It’s often the first decision of a new website project and usually on of the trickiest to get right — what Content Management System do I need?

Invariably you have IT on one side of the conversation and a digital team or design agency on the other, with content creators stuck somewhere in the middle. There are lots of competing priorities and everyone has an opinion having used tools in their previous or current roles.

Here are a few things to consider or ask your agency before you make that decision.

What’s a Content Management System?

If you’re reading this article, likely you’ve heard of some or all of Wordpress, Drupal, SiteCore, Craft, Adobe Experience Manager, Expression Engine — all examples of systems which can manage your website content.

Broadly, these tools allow humans to add words, pictures, video and other types of content to a website, without having to get into ‘code’. It is often said that if you can use Microsoft Word, you can use one of these systems to get your content onto a medium which can be seen by the whole world.

That’s the theory. Unfortunately most of these systems actually make it quite tricky to understand how content is going to be displayed, usually require a level of technical confidence far beyond Office and don’t even come with a little paperclip to help you along.

That’s not to say they’re all bad. Quite often, the improved technical capabilities which many give, are worth the steep learning curve associated with the tool. If you’re main aim of a website is to integrate with an end to end personalised, maximised, optimized, digitalized marketing system, then you need some pretty serious kit to make this happen.

If on the other hand, the main aim of your website is to simply publish content that your audiences want, you might not need something with all of these bells and whistles. It might just be, that less is actually more.

“INTEGRATION”

Integration is a scary word and a scary line to see on any project budget sheet. It essentially means trying to get a pair (or more) of tools to work together. This is not always a simple task. It is made harder by the fact that integration can mean everything from reading a single word out of a file, to creating an entire database of products in real time, 24/7 365 days a year.

Unfortunately, the conversation usually starts and ends with the systems that your CMS needs to integrate with. This should only be one part of the decision making process. Whilst your CMS is obviously a piece of technology, the people and processes that need to fit around it make up your overall capability to manage content on your website.

“It needs to integrate with Donorfy” — this is often a requirement that we get set at the start of our charity web builds. More often than not, what this really means is we simply need to take Donorfy’s donation widgets and place them on the site and style them up. Most charities are not looking to have a real time link between their website and their supporter database — they just want to be able to take donations which their finance team can handle and track.

So how do I choose the right CMS?

There’s no right and wrong answer to the question of which CMS to use. It depends on all sorts of factors. From our experience, these are some of the things you can start by considering:

Who is going to be using it?

As always, it’s worth starting a digital project by thinking about the people involved in the final product. If your CMS is going to be used by a central, specialised team then you can afford for the tool to have a steeper learning curve. This will allow you to have a system that allows you more technical complexity and customisation behind the content.

If you need people all across the organisation to pick up and put down your CMS, only using it every few weeks or even months, you need something that’s much easier to get to grips with. It really does need to be as simple as Microsoft Word, or perhaps even better!

What kind of data is it going to need to present to users?

If you need to pull content from your membership database or present a supporters record to them, then you’ll need something which can speak to those systems. This isn’t always as big a task as it seems — with many databases providing easy to access ways of doing this (usually called APIs).

Some of the bigger, more technically led systems have tools for connecting with these databases built in. If not, then they are more likely to be able to use a third party system like Zapier to do so. It’s worth looking into exactly how easy this will be and how much specialist code your developer or agency might need to write — as these quickly become costly overheads.

What information will it need to collect from users?

As well as presenting data, your website will often capture information from your audiences. This could be as simple as an email newsletter sign up, or as complex as a full membership registration process.

The main decision you need to make is if you want to keep this information in your website back end, or if you want to send it to another database. If it’s the second, you’ll likely need a more complex system. If you are happy to manually export from your website into another system, can use a plug in / widget (like from MailChimp) or you don’t need to export it at all, then things are likely to be a bit simpler.

What kind of actions will users be taking on your site?

Donations, event sign ups, course registrations, forum contributions, raising money online — all of these are services that your website could offer on behalf of a charity.

If you want to control every aspect of these and have particular requirements about data, then using third party services might not cut it. If you have the budget available then you can build your own. This means you probably need a heavyweight technical CMS to handle this and a lot of customised code to do so.

If you’re not planning on building your own tools, then you’ll be handing off to other providers. People like PayPal, Stripe, WorldPay are all really good at making this easy, no matter what CMS you are using.

How much money do you have to develop your website over the next 2 years?

If you’re going to build a lot of technical kit yourself, then you’re going to need to maintain and develop it. This is unsurprisingly going to cost money and team resource so you need to set yourself up to have that in place.

If you’re not going to be able to have budgets to add new content types, designs features or functionality, then you need to be a bit more realistic about the flexibility your system should have. New needs can and will come up from your organisation and you need a CMS that can handle them, without having to call a developer at every stage.

Why you might consider a Heavily Technical CMS:

• You want to display information that’s stored within multiple databases
• Your website needs to hand off to ticketing systems
• You need to integrate your own technical services into your user experience
• It’s important that data isn’t stored within your CMS
• You have a central technical / digital team that can maintain content
• There are Digital Marketing tools which need to constantly change content and tracking on your site

A few Content Centred CMS reasons:

• You want to allow technical and non technical people to collaborate on content together through approaches such as pair writing
• Your aim is to enable training and eventual devolution of content creation to all parts of the organisation, regardless of ‘digital’ skill
• You use 3rd party services for all transactions and don’t need to store data
• You have a number of campaigns or products which will need their own digital presence, but you don’t want to create micro-sites
• They’ll be quicker and cheaper to roll out and develop ongoing