Choosing The Right CMS – 5 Questions You Should Ask

Making the right choice in the midst of available CMS’s such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal has it’s challenges. This decision requires a bit of technical knowledge and a generous understanding of what users should do when they visit your website. With a few considerations in advance, the process can be slightly easier.

• Will the website be used for a business?
• Will the website be used for a personal site or blog?

These two questions change the depth of technical knowledge required. But in all fairness even a personal blog can have quite extensive features.

If you search “How to start a blog” or “The Best CMS” you’ll find endless articles on the topic. We chose to write about this because customers often approach us with new exciting projects. Often times as part of their process they are considering a new CMS.

We find that the most highly polished and completed projects often have these 5 questions answered beforehand:

1. What will our users need to do or find when they visit our website? (Create a goals list)
2. How do we plan to promote or grow our audience. (Add these answers to your list)
3. Of the CMS’s we’re considering which one allows us to easily change content related to our list of goals?
4. If we wanted a totally new design in one year, what would the cost (time or money) be?
5. What are some of the growing trends such as responsive design? How would choosing a particular CMS help us stay current?

At minimum asking these questions can:

• Prepare you to have a good dialog with a design/development team
• Help you explore ideas you may have not considered

For those starting out, wanting to build a new (never before existed) website or personal blog, there are many options but just starting is often more important than the fine details. Once you get started there are feature rich options such as the Get Noticed Theme for WordPress from Michael Hyatt. You could also check ThemeForest for new themes.

For businesses – don’t get too focused on CMS’s exclusively for the purpose of utilizing pre designed themes (just to save money). There is still a good case for custom built software when you’re doing something that may have never been thought about or needed.

When you’re ready we have pretty great auto-installation packages for many of the most common CMS’s. You can install them in a few minutes:

• WordPress (cPanel or Windows)
• OsCommerce (cPanel or Windows)
• Magento (cPanel or Windows)
• Joomla (cPanel or Windows)
• DotNetNuke (Windows)
• Mura (Windows ColdFusion)
• ContentBox (Windows ColdFusion)

These are also on our VPS platforms for Windows, cPanel or ColdFusion Windows.

Often times many of hosting providers offer little or no support. When you’re ready to launch your next website with a new CMS, we’re glad to discuss your plans and make sure you’re choosing the right hosting solution.

Categories: Hosting