After you have decided that you want to build a personal or company website, you then need to immediately choose a content management system. This is the platform which you are going to use to upload all of your content, manage comments, email and communicate with your growing community. There are many CMS’s available these days like Sitefinity, the ever-popular WordPress and Joomla. There are also different benefits for each platform you choose, which is why it is so important that you decide on what features your platform will need to have before you decide to choose one over the other.
Ease of Use and Structure
If you are the type of person who wants something that is very intuitive and easy to interact with, then you may want to choose a platform that makes things easy for you. Many CMS’s do not function exactly the way you would think from a user’s perspective and in some cases are built more for people who can do their own web development.
Many people think of just adding pages, deleting posts and organizing the flow of their website with just the click of a few buttons. You may not want all of your posts to be available in a purely chronological order or maybe, on the other hand, you do, for the sake of simplicity. The point is that CMS’s have structures just like a customized website can have a certain structure for SEO purposes, only you may or may not be able to change it. If you find that you need more customizability, you may not want to go with a CMS that is only going to allow you to post in chronological order.
Take the time to understand the work flow of the Content Management System and if that works for you. For example, one of the reasons a platform like WordPress is so popular is because it is very easy to use for the layperson. If this is you, you might consider a platform like WordPress.
How Content is Edited and Uploaded
How your content appears on your website and if it has a consistent theme or look is becoming increasingly more important as more people are turning to content providers to upload content to their business websites. In order to suffer as little re-editing of freshly published content by your content writer, the content editors, or the area on your CMS where you can write content and change the fonts and colors, is becoming more limited.
Basically, in order to maintain a consistent theme and to avoid you having to go back in to edit your site for consistency, the CMS has created an environment that forces your content writer to produce consistent looking content. If you can’t do much more than bold text, italicize it and change font sizes, then you don’t have to worry about unnecessary variability from one post to the next, essentially.
Images
Additionally, similar problems exist for images. If you upload an image, how much work are you going to have to do for it to appear exactly as you envisioned? You also want to ask yourself if you can attach a meta-description here for SEO purposes.
Similarly to images, if you think you are going to need to upload files to your Content Management System, you want to consider how easy or difficult that is going to be. Will there be formatting issues?
There are many other things that you need to consider when deciding on a CMS. For example, the code that goes behind building the CMS can effect how easily your site is crawled and indexed by search engines. You don’t want to utilize a CMS that is going to hinder your page rank by any means. In addition to this, there are many other subtleties that effect your website.
We recommend working with a web development company who understands all of the pros and cons of each CMS available to help you choose the CMS that is going to meet your needs, wether it is for business or personal purposes.
What CMS are you using? Are there any features that frustrate you?
Let us know in the comments below.
