Choosing a CMS

A guide to choosing a CMS.

Do you need a CMS?

The most important question you want to ask yourself is "Is a CMS right for my site?". The main criteria are:

  1. Are you updating your website regularly? If you are updating it regularly then getting a content management system is a logical choice. If you are not going to update your website daily, then a static HTML site is easier to maintain.

  2. How important is SEO to you? If you have a comunnity-based site then SEO may not be a big deal for you but if you run a content-driven site and you use a CMS to automate content management then you may lose SEO because, many times, the pages don't index well with the search engines.

  3. How important is branding to you? Because your CMS will have the same design as many other sites, your site won't be able to build a strong brand. Strong branding is what seperates great sites from good sites. But if you are running, for example, a small web site for a specific group of people which requires a strong backend then you may not care about growing your site to be huge and successful. But for those who want to grow their site as a business you will want to craft an individual identity for yourself then having a CMS may damage you if you don't get a unique design for your site.

  4. How many "backend" features do you want? and how badly do you want them? If you mainly want just a forum but you can do without the other stuff then I would recommend plugging just a forum into your site. But if you absolutely need a forum, log-in system, article publishing, and commenting all integrated with each other then a CMS will make everything easier.

  5. How good of a coder are you? And how good will you be? If you are the kind of person that doesn't understand code and never will then you'll want to get a CMS if you plan on having an integrated site. The better coder you are then you will be more likely to be able to write your own code or integrate different scripts.

Which CMS should I get?

  1. Get one that is free if you can. Most CMSs are free. There may be reasons why you should pay for one: if you have very specific requirements, or you need a particular feature of a paid one, or you want one that will definitely publish upgrades, or you want good support. But most webmasters shouldn't need to pay for a good one - or at least not have to pay a lot.

  2. Choose one that is popular. It used to be that there were only a few differnet CMSs available but now there are tons of people coding them. But if you go with a popular CMS there will more likely to be better support and more upgrades, as well as the fact that there is a higher chance the bugs have been worked out. Don't ever install a CMS that has many customer complaints about bugs.

  3. Choose one that has a very active support forum with other users sharing features they created and one with plenty of third-party sites which create skins and themes.

  4. Choose one that can be integrated with other popular software - like VBulletin, phpBB, or Gallery.

  5. Is it open source? It can be easier to make custom changes to an open-source CMS but ones that aren't open-source sometimes have a more unified direction when it comes to developing the software.

CMS Listings

MoveableType.org
opensourcecms.com
mamboserver.com
drupal.org
plone.org
postnuke.com
pMachine.com


 
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