How to Choose a CMS

SEO

Tips to Help You Find a Great Content Management System

Photo by Nektarios Sylligardakis / Flickr

If you’re in the market for a new content management system – aka CMS – you’re probably confused by all the options available. To help you out, we’re going to give you a short checklist of things you want to do before you make your decision. As a bonus, we’re going to give you a list of the three most commonly used CMS software online.

How to Choose a CMS

Here’s a simple list of the things you want to consider before you make a decision about what CMS to use.

  • Technical Knowledge – How technical you are when it comes to coding will have an effect on which choice you make. For example, if you’re good at coding, Drupal or Joomla may be a better choice to give you more options. On the other hand, if you want something simple, you should go with something like WordPress that doesn’t require as many skills to install or use.

  • Themes / Plugins – Each CMS will call these elements something slightly different, but it comes down to how your website is going to look and functionality. You want to choose a CMS that has a lot of options but at the same time worries about security and making sure code is safe for others to use on their website. Most major CMS platforms are going to have a lot of choices available.

Top Three Current CMS Choices

Here’s a look at three of the major CMS choices you can make.

  • Drupal – Based on PHP, Drupal has been around for a while now. Installing this CMS has gotten easier over the years, but you still have to do a lot of setup and install a lot of modules in order to get started with anything other than a basic blog website.

  • WordPress – The most popular CMS currently is WordPress. Downloaded and used by millions of people this is super easy software to install and use. All of the great themes and plugins for the CMS make it easy to have it do whatever you want.

  • Joomla – Based off of early Drupal code, Joomla has sprouted into it’s own tool. This is not easy to use, but it allows you to customize almost everything. This can be a bit overwhelming if you’re new to content management systems.

As you can see, a lot goes into which CMS you should choose. The fact that there are so many choices out there doesn’t make it any easier. Just remember that if you stick with one of the major three, you’re going to have a larger community of other users who can help answer your questions and more.

Bio

Sarah Jessica has been shopping for engagement rings for a while, trying to find the perfect one. Shopping online has helped a lot, allowing her to look at a lot of different samples.

Leave a Reply