Content Management Systems are the fastest, easiest, most efficient way to build a website. They allow you to not start from scratch on the development of every little piece, and are often times designed with core functionality that can be utilized to scale development efforts and capabilities. The most well-known and popular CMS on the market today is Wordpress. Wordpress was originally developed as a blogging software and has become increasingly popular in recent years- for many good reasons! It's easy to use, easy to maintain, flexible, and incredibly easy for users with little-to-no programming skills to add/edit content. For smaller businesses that only have a few pages of content for their readers, Wordpress is certainly worth considering.

Aside from Wordpress, there are dozens of other CMS options that are worth considering depending on your project requirements. Many of our larger, more complex projects have been developed in Joomla because of its native capability to robustly handle User Based Permissions. This is important when you want to share information with some groups of users, but not others (ex: departments within a company). Other projects have utilized Magento because of its fantastic E-Commerce capabilities. Drupal also has some fantastic options for more experienced users.

There are many options that all have advantages and disadvantages. However, when choosing both a Content Management System as well as a Web Design and Development firm, there are a few things of which you should be cautious:

Avoid web-designers who only use Wordpress!

While Wordpress is certainly a fantastic option for many sites, be weary of any companies who exclusively use Wordpress. Due to the simplistic nature of Wordpress, it allows many people to play in the development game who might not have the required skills to handle more complex tasks. While your project might be a 5 page website and a contact form right now (easy for Wordpress to handle), you might decide in a year that your site needs some increasingly complex functions to really make it an integral part of your business. As the complexity of your site grows, you might quickly outgrow the web-designer that originally built your site. This is a large difference in web-designers and true web-developers.

Another potential issue that you might face with web-design companies that don't truly understand search functions and algorithms is that your new, beautiful site will likely lack a lot of the necessary tweaks to make it completely optimized for the major search engines (specifically, Google). If your new site isn't completely optimized, then you will likely never rank as well as you should in your industry. This means missed opportunities and fewer customers who found you online.

So while Wordpress certainly has a solid place in the market, be careful about dealing with any web-design group that only has experience in Wordpress... There are a number of reasons that could be potential issues down the road.

Make sure that you choose a CMS that Can Handle Growth and Increasing Complexity

Out of all the magnificent options that you have for a PHP based Content Mangement System, there are really four primary contenders in the market:

• Wordpress
• Joomla
• Drupal
• Magento

Magento is exclusively an E-Commerce platform (and an awesome one, to be sure), so we will exclude it from this conversation. In order of user complexity they are as listed above, with Wordpress being the most simple to use and Drupal being the most difficult. With that said, it's important to note that with complexity generally comes power. This is why many of our projects are built in Joomla. The backend is certainly easy enough for a "non-coder" to use with no trouble, yet the overall native capabilities are a good bit more robust than those of Wordpress. Since many of our projects have been "larger" and more complex in nature- it makes sense that we have chosen different tools for each job. 

Define your project as clearly and neatly as you can, and let's talk about some of the long-term goals for your company and your website. We'll help you decide which CMS is right for your project, and then we'll help you develop out your site.