Choosing a Content Management System for Your Website: Six Points to Consider

Choosing a Content management system is one of the most important decisions to make while you are planning a website development. You need to consider number of pages and planned website load, custom designed or a web template. Who will be updating the site - editor qualification requirements and how often content will be changed? What type of information do you want to present: text, audio, video and what type of user interaction is to be implemented?

Volume and load. While it is not so important how many pages it will be - you can usually count them, usually problem is with the estimated load. Someone believes that it will be 1 mln hits per month or even more. This is a great thing to believe. But such traffic is a result of a hard and long work of the promotion team, taking that you have really interesting content suitable the large audience. Not every CMS software can handle such a load. In this case, it is recommended using a special NoSQL solution together with a server such as Nginx. If we see it realistically, most of modern CMS will work fine for a new website. Having video online will not make a difference if you host it elsewhere i.e. at YouTube.

Design. Most of the CMS have a large collection of so-called design themes. So you just have to choose the one that you like. It will save you a lot of effort and money. Unfortunately, someday you may discover that some other site looks exactly the same as yours. If it does not bother you, move on to the next point. For those caring enough to have a unique and beautiful design we can recommend to find a great local design studio. Why not outsource? It is our conviction, that only local designers can create something truly relevant to your business. They should know modern trends and fashion, everything that looks great in your country.

Content updates. Once your new site is up, you need to fill it with some content. Some parts of the website such as blog, news, product, testimonials, gallery may require frequent updates. A person who is in charge for doing updates may have or may not have web editing, HTML coding or graphics editing skills. This fact may affect the choice of a CMS, as each one of them have different level of complexity.

Types of content. Most of the modern CMS easily cope with various types of content. Nevertheless, it is worth to do some planning ahead. Some long videos or streaming content may slow down the performance of your website or the whole server, which inevitably brings problems with your hosting company, especially if you are on shared plan.

User actions. It is up to you if want to have forms, polls, forums or a shopping cart. You just need to know this ahead to choose the right CMS capable to do it all. You should plan it together with your web developer, how this information will be recorded or sent by email, how it will be processed in the back-end. Here you will need to have some user-friendly interface as well, but perhaps not so good-looking as the user-side.

Website Promotion. Now you have a website, but no one visits it? This is a serious loss and here you may need a SEO (search engine optimization) expert. SEO will analyze your target audience, predict its behavior and propose you a web promotion strategy. It can be link exchange with the relevant sites from the same industry, HTML code optimization, a contextual banner advertising, promotion in social networks etc. All these measures can be planned at the later stage, but it will be good to know the SEO requirements during the planning phase, as requirement to provide some SEO tools may affect the choice of the CMS.

Having all 6 point considered saves your time/money and brings a peace of mind to your developer. But some of the customers have already made the choice based on their previous experience or someone positive reviews. And it is a bad idea to argue with that, because client is always right. What you really need to do is inform your client of all consequences of their choice so that they can make a responsible and a fully informed decision.

Alex Zdorovetsky is a CTO at I Need a Website LLC, a Web Software development company established in 2002. We are constantly looking for new clients for our areas of expertise: e-commerce, CMS, web development, flash/actionscript and custom programming as well as new partners to deliver our services to your local markets.

Please visit us at ineed.ws.

View the original article here