There are thousands of questions that need to be answered before starting your development process. Оne of them is a concern of the choice of the proper platform for the website.
The answer may surprise you.
The trick is that you can implement your project with any CMS, all of them will be suitable. For example, you can take Joomla and make the site of any type: online shop, content design, blog, portal, web services, business card website etc.
During this … “mind battle”, you’ll definitely run into people who insist that Joomla or Drupal – complete nonsense and your project would be better on another CMS. In most cases, their devotion to the particular CMS is connected only to their personal preference.
But this doesn’t mean that you need to take the first available CMS and make a website on it.
Firstly, if you entrust your website development to the particular specialist, it is better to let him work with his favorite platform.
Secondly, you still have to choose CMS with “perfect” functionality that will fit all your needs.
It is better to spend an hour to a research today than to lose time and money on CMS replacement in the future.
If you’re concerned about the choice of CMS platform, our future series of posts will be devoted to this topic and we’ll try to help you to select the best one for your website.
To be continued…
Never settle for so-called “self-written” CMS. It can be used only in one case: if you write it by yourself. Also, you can’t build your website using HTML, because it will restrict your possibilities.
The answer is obvious: use the free platform, if it’s possible. Agree to a paid CMS only when the functionality of the free product doesn’t meet the needs of your project.
Sellers of commercial CMS may try to convince you to buy a product using such arguments:
– “Our team has developed the most functional and secure CMS in the history. Only for blah blah $…” Sounds interesting and professional, but are you sure that this company won’t disappear in the next three months?
– “Anyone can hack your website with free CMS, because it has the open source.” This is a myth. Everything can be hacked, regardless of whether it is free or not.
– “Search engines will always give more traffic to the websites based on paid CMS, and free CMS are viewed with suspicion.” This is a myth.
Every CMS can be classified as suitable or unsuitable for your project. At the same time, both groups included both paid and free CMS.
It’s hard to measure the suitability of platform functionality for the project if you aren’t an expert. But at least, you can compare the chosen CMS capabilities with a basic set of functionality.
So, let’s start with the convenient visual editor.
Using the editor interface, you can easily work with visual objects, as well as edit and publish content on your website. This type of interface called WYSIWYG what’s mean What You See Is What You Get. Also, it’s better to choose the CMS with kind of editor, which allows you to work with content in a visual mode and HTML.
There are some examples:
We gave you only a few examples here to demonstrate the principles of platform’s editor comparison. And it would be better to check out the usability and functionality of the editor during publishing a note in the demo version.
In the next post, you will find out about a set of functions and features that allow to make CMS more SEO-friendly.
So, here we’ll talk about the set of functions and features that allows to adapt CMS to the needs of users of search engines. You will find out whether you have enough of SEO-friendliness by default for successful website promotion.
Use the following criteria to evaluate the CMS adaptation to the needs of users of search engines:
The main purpose of CMS is a publication and content management. When you adapt your CMS for the content publishing in accordance with the characteristics of the project and the needs of its audience, it’s called customization. For example, if you create a blog, CMS should display the latest publications on the main page, and if you maintain an online store, you should be able to publish the product card.
Choosing CMS, consider the following characteristics:
Also, we’d like to draw your attention to such function as managing user access levels.
This feature is useful for different types of projects: online store, website and blog. For example, the website owner may provide premium access to the restricted sections for paid subscribers. Or create special opportunities for regular customers and loyalty program participants.
Here are the examples of CMS access control levels:
So, it becomes more clearly why the possibility of customization is an important component of the CMS. In the next post we will try to give a brief description about which platform is best suited to a particular type of project.
Online Store. You can create an online store with any of the CMS. But, the ideal content management system for online store should have the following characteristics:
Corporate website. Choosing a CMS for a corporate website, firstly, you need to analyze two characteristics: simplicity of using and features necessary for your project.
Big content project. For sure, you wouldn’t build your blog or media site on the CMS that was created for E-commerce projects only. But, if you choose any other multipurpose CMS, your project will work.
Remember, the success of the content project depends on its quality and relevance, but not on the editor or CMS.
Forum. You’ll need a specialized CMS, for example, vBulletin, IPB, phpBB. Please note that you can set the forum on subdomain of your site or use plugins and modules to extend the CMS functionality. You might be interested in such modules for popular CMS:
Besides, you can find similar solutions for other popular CMS.
In our next and last post on this topic, we’ll analyze some of the CMS according to their purpose.
If you have the necessary knowledge and skills, you can create any project with any CMS. Thus, choosing a CMS, you should always rely on your personal preferences and experience.
But, if you don’t have such experience, we think the following comparison table is might be useful for you.
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