Content Management Systems
Building a website and doing it right will have a great impact on the overall image you project to your future clients and overall visitors. The days of building websites full of static pages are long over. In the age of new media as a website owner you simply can’t afford to slack off or take a shortcut when build your company website. Choosing the right cms platform for your new website can be challenging and sometimes overwhelming especially for non-technical individuals. The purpose and need for a content management system is to help you with the storage and management of your website content while engaging in other opportunities such as Search Engine Optimization and Social Media endeavors.
Choosing The Right CMS Platform
One of the first things that you’ll need to do is to familiarize yourself with the structure of a content management system so that you have a basic understanding of how each individual platform can work for your business. In most cases you will be looking at using an Open Source Solution (OSS) as these are generally the ones mostly used by website owners nowadays. These particular content management systems are dynamically driven applications having been written in a coding language such as PHP. All content information of your entire website gets stored into a database such as MySQL and accessed in the same fashion on the front end of your website by your visitors. Before taking off on a journey to seek the right cms platform for your new website here are a few things that you should answer to yourself before doing so.
- What are the intentions of your website other than content storage and administration?
- Will this be a multi-user access website?
- Will you be utilizing social media and syncing it with your new website presence?
- Is e-commerce something that you’ll be engaging in at some point in time?
- Is Search Engine Optimization important and will you be optimizing for it?
These are just a few questions that we suggest you ask yourself prior to launching the hunt for a proper content management system that will suit your needs. There are quite a few cms solutions that you can choose from on the web and we’ve listed a few of them below.
Joomla Content Management System
The #1 Open Source Solution (OSS) on the web currently today having received multiple awards in various categories. Backed up by a community of over 200,000 contributors including supporters, testers, developers, & team leaders. This particular Content Management System offers everything that any website owner would need ranging from Content Management, Multi-User Access, Security, Blogging, E-Commerce, Search Engine Optimization, and much more. With various component, plugins, and modules available on the web your website will be well taken care of with this particular application. Find out more about this web solution for your next website at Joomla.org
WordPress
If you’re in the need of a professional business blogging solution than WordPress would be your ideal choice. This web application offers unlimited potential for bloggers seeking to maximize their online exposure organically and via social media channels. This particular web application is used as a compliment to a primary website in order to help boost organic exposure. There are also various individual entrepreneurs that are using WordPress as well to build their own brand and promote themselves on the web. If in need of a blogging web application solution then WordPress can handle your requirements and help you create great visibility on the web.
Drupal
It’s perhaps one of the least used Open Source Solutions (OSS) today although one that definitely requires some baseline skill and knowledge of PHP. Drupal is a dynamically driven web application that enables each user to store its data in a MySQL database and manage it in the same fashion. This particular application is most commonly used by web developers and especially PHP programmers. It offers an open platform that lets you customize your entire website. While this may require quite a bit more coding it may not be the ideal solution for building a fully scaled website. Drupal does not have many add-ons that you can utilize and would most likely function poorly when in conjunction with e-commerce or seeking to be optimized for SEO. If you’re seeking to sync your Drupal installation with social media than you also may find this challenging as there aren’t too many bolt-ons to help you do that.
Whichever content management solution you choose we hope that you can find out that matches your needs. Choosing the right web application platform can be a bit challenging and maybe even overwhelming. If you have any further questions or would like to find out more about which CMS fits your needs feel free to call us at (314) 537-7974.
If you go by the numbers on drupal.org modules section, and the numbers on Joomla.org’s extensions section, Drupal has more add-ons than Joomla. Is there a reason not to trust those numbers?
Honest question… I was just surprised by the “drupal does not have many add-ons” comment, because I’ve always felt it was competitive with community add-ons. I had never compared them, personally.
Tim,
That’s a great argument there! In our experience Drupal is geared more towards the advanced programmer and perhaps specifically the PHP developer. Therefore it doesn’t leave much room for customization to the end user particularly the novice or intermediate. Also preference plays a big role here for most users seeking an ideal content management system solution. In our case we’ve found that Joomla is versed in the area of extensions and provides an easy-to-use interface.
The numbers are actually slightly off on both sections. In part due to the fact that some modules, components, plugins are no longer supported or perhaps even abandoned in some cases. Nonetheless we appreciate your input.