Selecting a Content Management System (CMS)
When selecting a Content Management System (CMS) for your website, consider the following:
- Will your website have a significant affect on your business? For example, a restaurant business is not going to be severely affected by a poorly designed website.
- Do you have a very specific, highly custom and very large-scale plan for your website? For example, are you thinking of setting up a social networking community website similar to Facebook? Are you developing an Online auction?
- Will you offer a significant amount of content? Will your website have more than 50 pages?
- Will your website have a blog where people can post comments?
- Will your website offer a newsletter subscription?
- Will you be selling anything via your website? One item or multiple items? Locally or Internationally
- Will you offer free downloads of PDF, Word, Excel files?
- Will you have a lot of visual elements, such as product image galleries, photos, videos, etc?
- Will there be restricted areas on your website that would require users to login?
- Will you have a lot of social interaction on your site (posting comments, uploading photos, exchanging messages, etc.)?
- Do you have plans to grow and enhance your website gradually, i.e. adding polls, surveys, quizzes, adding e-commerce, etc.?
- Will you be changing the look and feel of your site frequently, i.e. once every 2 years?
If you answer 'Yes' to 5 of any of these questions, your choice of a CMS should be Joomla. If your website is largely driven by a blog or simple text - it is safe to select WordPress. If you answer 'Yes' with an strong emphasis to question #2 - select Drupal or Magento.
One of the benefits of selecting Joomla for your website back-end administration is ability to chose from over 8000 third party Joomla off-the-shelf components and plugins. A Using quality extensions a Joomla developer can "assemble" a highly complex and sophisticated site in a matter of days. Customizing the flow and adding granularity to the features can be later enhanced and completed in phases, adjusting the requirements to real user behqaviour.
Whatever you do, make sure to test drive your CMS. Do not solely rely on sales presentations or word of advice. Consider the following CMS comparison article. And if you are still uncertain and would like to talk to us about a website CMS, call Joomla Bliss at 613.231.6308.
