Choosing The Perfect CMS For Your Business

Choosing a content management system (CMS) for an ecommerce site is quite tricky. Without knowing the real needs of your business, you might end up with a CMS that has lots of limitations that cannot help your business to grow. This article outlines the steps that you need to take to find the perfect CMS for your business.

The very first step that you need to take is to figure out what your business needs from a CMS. For example, businesses usually need attractive website template, social media integration, search engine optimization (SEO) feature, branding option, multi-channel publishing, and online selling feature. Arranging a meeting with your marketing department and other related departments is a good way to determine all important functionalities that must be addressed by a CMS.

After listing all important functionalities, the next step is to conduct research on all available options. You may start by contacting owners or marketing managers of other businesses in your industry and ask them the CMS they are using and the pros and cons of their CMS.

For an example, Wordpress is one of the most popular platforms used by more than 30-percent websites on the internet. However, although Wordpress is the most popular CMS, it does not necessarily mean that it is the perfect CMS for your business. Some other popular platforms that you need to consider are Drupal , Magento , Joomla , Typo3 , and DotNetNuke .

Contact several CMS vendors and ask them how their platform can meet the budget and needs of your business. Arranging a meeting with the vendors is good option so they can show you how their platform works. If the platform is open source or you cannot arrange a meeting with the vendors, you should ask websites in your industry that are using their CMS.

If you can arrange a meeting or a conference call with the vendors, make sure you ask all questions related to the application of the CMS for your business. Some of the basic questions that you need to ask include how easily the CMS can be installed, how long to migrate from your current platform to the new platform, possible frontend customizations, and the pros and cons of the CMS. One thing to keep in mind is that there is no perfect platform, so if you meet a vendor that cannot explain the weaknesses of its CMS, you'd better stay away from that vendor.

In case you are not interested to use open source platform like Wordpress, it is important to ask the upcoming developments or features that the vendors are going to launch. Internet commerce is constantly changing and a good CMS vendor is usually confident to explain their future plans. If you choose a less popular platform, you need to make sure that the vendor can give you a reliable support and customizable functionalities that your business needs when your customers grow.

As mentioned above, choosing the perfect CMS is quite tricky so it is possible that you make a mistake or two when choosing a CMS. To avoid costly mistakes and wasting much time, it will be wise to test a CMS for 3-6 months before committing for a longer contract.