When it comes to the amount of stress it can put you through, creating and managing your website can range from a sunset beach stroll to an Ironman Triathlon, depending on which content management system you choose. While some adventurous and overly optimistic people seem to get a kick out of solving issues inherent in some broken and inadequate content management platforms, most entrepreneurs and ‘recreational’ web administrators want their content management system to work with, and not against them. In this article we tried to sum up some of the basic criteria for choosing an adequate content management system and presenting yourself or your business online.
Choose the right vendor
Choosing a content management system is like choosing a car. There are plenty of stereotypes going around in the web community, which can influence you to buy a CMS that doesn’t match all your needs. That’s why each CMS search should start from vendors and developers providing them. You need to closely evaluate their offer for these basic criteria:
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Support– how much support vendor offers with its CMS? Different companies even offer additional services like hosting, web design or mentoring.
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Community– popular CMSs with large communities standing behind them are much easier to manage. For example, solutions to most problems that appear while managing WordPress or Drupal can be found on their respective community forums.
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Stability– this is a very important issue, especially for business websites that plan to grow in the future.
Understand your needs
You shouldn’t invest money in any type of software before you do an evaluation of your business or personal needs and before you try to predict your company’s growth for several years to come. By doing all you can to make an objective assessment of your capabilities you will learn how strong, customizable and expensive your CMS should be.
Start from the least expensive solutions
If you are running your personal blog and you are planning to earn a few bucks with Google AdSense, you will start with free blogging platforms like, Blogger, Tumblr or WordPress. Buying your domain and downloading a free content management system should probably be your next step, but only when you are sure that this investment will pay off. This comes only after you’ve earned a significant amount of money from your blog and successfully used all the benefits that free blogging platforms offer. When your business leaves SME framework, it’s the right time to take a more serious approach to your web presence management and purchase an advanced CMS option, or hire a digital agency to take care of your web design needs.
Closely inspect features each CMS is offering
Ask vendors to send you a requirements matrix and check each feature individually. Determine whether product’s features suit your needs, and try to find an online product review which presents each feature in a more elaborate way. Some of the most basic features a CMS should include are:
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Separation of content and presentations;
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Support for Windows and Mac;
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Mobile authoring and approvals;
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Mobile content delivery;
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Multi-lingual support, etc.
Try several product demos
When you find several products that suit your needs, ask vendors to send you the demos. This is a very important step, because the only way you can truly inspect a product’s UX is by trying it out yourself. Although thoroughly inspecting several demos might take some time, this step will enable you to answer some of the most critical questions of your CMS search and choose a product that answers all of the challenges your future web presentation will be facing.
Choosing the right CMS is one of the most important steps in developing an engaging web presentation, and one that allows you to make use of all the benefits that digital marketing brings. That is why you should approach this task seriously and do your homework before choosing which software you’ll use to try to turn your content into a viral wonder.