Choosing a content management system (CMS)

This is one of the hardest things for a new web site owner to do because most CMS systems claim to do most things and it’s only by living with a system that you realise how well the reality lives up to the Hype. In practice there are three main routes:

• Proprietary system
• Open source
• “boxed software” product

The first pitfall can be in choosing a proprietary system. Unless it has been designed specifically around your peculiar needs, there are many negatives in this approach. Primarily this is because you are umbilicaly linked to the developer and their ability to service and maintain your system.

The next great argument in CMS circles is open-source or off-the-shelf or “boxed software”. This tends to be philosophically based rather than rooted in practicalities and vendors can have firmly fixed views. Be careful of falling for tales of “free software” or an unlimited army of support workers, or “there’s a module that can do anything”. Open-source can be good, but some is better than others and there are trends and some lose favour. Also support is not “on demand” and modules are of varying quality as you would expect of free and often unsupported code.

At Nvisage, we think we take a rather pragmatic view about which CMS to use, and we’ve tried a few... It really is a matter of choosing the right tool for the job and budget in hand. For this reason we tend to use three primary CMS products, two open-source and one off-the-shelf.

WordPress

WordPress has come a long way since just being the best blogging tool around. There are now so many plugins that it can go a long way before you need to think about a more capable system. For relatively uncomplicated sites such as brochure sites, WordPress is a great tool that will make the most of your budget. There are plenty of web 2.0 tools and social networking tools as well so you can add plenty of interaction for your audience(s).

Joomla!

Joomla comes into its own when things get a bit more complicated, and in particular where you want more editing controls and membership functionality. Joomla is a portal or community type site and is better where you wish to add integrated membership area, private pages, forums, articles with expiry dates etc. Joomla’s strength is also in complexity, deep level navigation, with multiple sub-sections, categories etc.

Ektron

Ektron is a different entity entirely not least because it requires a reasonable outlay for the initial licence and development. However, what you get is arguably a more professional package. It is designed to provide a full workflow system with multiple levels of editors and publishers, each with their own privileges. It also has a very professional interface system with its own WYSIWYG visual editor. Where it excels is where you want more automation, greater personalisation and to work with structured content. So for example it is possible to create quite complex page layouts and content simply and with no technical knowledge via the use of their “smart form” layout. This allows the editor to add more complex presentations such as tabbed content, insert components such as video, and slideshows, polls etc. A very useful advanced feature is in its ability to deal with structured content, i.e. multiple pages of content which has the same structure such as catalogues. It allows the user to simply enter content into pre-defined sections such as Header, précis, main etc, in a consistent and quick manner.

Finally Ektron provide a Service Level Agreement (SLA) and maintenance contract with their developers which allows for fast response times with the people who have developed the software.

To conclude..

It really does come down to:

1. What you want to do with your site
2. What your content is going to be
3. How many people edit your site and how
4. And of course how much you are prepared to pay

We’ve chosen software platforms that we can be confident meets the needs of any organisation and almost any budget. We have concentrated our skills upon these systems and these are ably supported by our skills in:

• Business analysis
• Branding
• graphical design
• Information architecture
• Digital marketing