Website Advice Part 2: Choosing the Right CMS

Licenced or Open Source?

You should be thinking three years down the line here. If your website is going to be updated on a regular basis with news, company information, industry development, and those updates are going to be handled by someone who is not technically savvy, if the website is going to grow in size with new sections or functionality, then you need a CMS. So you find out there are a whole slew of content management systems out there, but which one is for you?

The size and complexity of the CMS should be commensurate with the size and complexity of your website. Drupal, Joomla, typo3, Bitrix, Wordpress, Concrete 5 ... whether licensed or open source, there is a CMS for every taste. At the end of the day, you don’t want a hydraulic excavator when all you really needed was a shovel.  A few things to consider:

How secure do you need your site to be? Is it large and complicated? If yes to both, Typo3, Joomla and Drupal are good examples of CMS aimed at more complicated websites.  A licensed CMS, such as Imperia and Bitrix, are those where an annual license is required. The drawback to a licensed CMS is often has far fewer ‘off the shelf features’, so there is more custom coding (and in turn higher cost for your web project).

How tech savvy are you? How many will need to have administrative access to the site? If the answer is not very savvy and more than two are administrators, consider a simple open source like WordPress.

How many pages is your site? Will you be adding sections, features, etc? If it’s more than XX pages and you know you’ll be adding to that, reach for something like Drupal, one of the most popular open source CMS and one of the most robust in terms of available plug-ins and modules open source CMS. Drupal has huge communities regularly developing cool modules and plugins that are free. So with a few clicks, you can integrate a newsletter function into your new site.

You should also consider that a CMS will involve both your time (which is money) or the time of an agency (whose time is also money).   Net week: Part 3, HONEY's CMS FAQs.

Part 1: http://www.honeydesign.ca/honey-blog/cms-advice-part1