Content management system (CMS) is installed on the server
which allows maintaining & managing pages, blogs & articles online. You
can easily write or modify content on your website & instantly updated. CMS
provides separation between articles & web design, so you can focus on
content & not to worry about copying the web design from page to page. CMS
became very popular in last few years, so you should choose right CMS provider
according to your needs. Below mentioned are some important things that you
need to keep in mind while choosing a CMS for your website.
CMS should match your
needs:
There are many types of websites like: company, commercial,
news, blog, entertainment, personal, educational etc. So choice of CMS depends
on type of website. So before choosing CMS you should make a list according to
your website needs.
Managing Assets:
Images & files management is very badly in some CMS. This
is negative thing for your site & users. So you should make sure that your
CMS provides Alt tags to images & also provides some basic image editing
tools like cropping, rotating, resizing etc. Your CMS should deal with word
documents, PDFs & other files properly.
Search:
Users start with search when they looking for content. So
search is very important aspects for your site. You should changes website
regularly so that search engine index your website. You should make sure that
search engine index entire content of each page, images & attached files.
User Interaction:
If you want to host a community on your website then CMS must
provide forums, chat, comments & other functionality. You should also make
sure about tools exist for communicating with users like email newsletters,
news feeds & RSS etc.
Multiple Website Support:
This is must have feature. Your CMS should allow running
multiple website from same installation. You may want to create a separate
website for mobile devices due to growth of mobile web. So this is very important
feature.
CMS Platforms:
Today, there are many CMS platforms available in the market
like: wordpress, joomla, drupal & blooger etc. Below mentioned is brief
description about these platforms.
WordPress:
This is the most powerful CMS platform. This began as easy to
use & innovative blogging platform. Ease of use is key benefit for experts
& starters. This is easy to install & manage. This is very user
friendly with tutorials & support, technical experience is not necessary
for this. In this platform we can paste text from a MS Word document into a
WordPress site. This provides lots of informational resources, videos, themes
& templates designs. This is ideal for blogs, small business website &
personal websites.
Joomla:
Joomla is one of the most popular CMS platform for medium to large
sites & provides more flexibility & features than WordPress. There is
more plug-ins in joomla than any other CMS platform so this is good for high
traffic sites. This is good for multimedia & e-commerce websites. This is
more complex than WordPress & you should have fair technical knowledge
& able to create fairly complex sites.
Drupal:
This is powerful & developer friendly tool for creating
complex sites, so it requires experience to operate & advanced technical
knowledge. This is good for complex, advanced sites & sites that require
complex data organization. If you don’t have good technical or software
knowledge & you can’t hire technical expert than this platform is not for
you.
Blogger:
This is very simple blogging platform to setup a quick blog.
In this platform you can use your domain & can post a blog from your mobile
phone. But in this platform limited plug ins available & you can only use
this for blog.