Choosing the right Content Management System (CMS) from your Web hosting service is an important decision, because choosing the wrong one will impede the growth of your website and can make management much more difficult. These are the most important factors to consider when selecting your CMS:
Number of Add-Ons
Most CMS programs come with either official or user-generated add-ons. These add new functions to your CMS, and are often an important part of customizing the system to your needs. While you do not want to run too many add-ons at once, having a few can really push your website to the next level.
Popular CMSs will come with lots of add-ons that can help your search engine optimization (SEO), can make your product listings more attractive, or can add new functions to the website that are normally restricted by the CMS. Not only should you check for a high number of useful add-ons, but you should also see if they are commonly updated, because if they are not, they may become stagnant within several years. Add-ons are not required to use a CMS, but when it comes to customizing the website, you should definitely use them. Check for both usability and updates when looking this up.
Ease of Use
There are two extremes with CMSs from web hosting services. At one end there are CMSs that require lots of coding and development, but with which you are free to do just about anything. At the other end are CMSs that require little work, but which are often restricted because you cannot customize them as well. This decision comes down to how adept you are with programming; the former may be better if you are very skilled at programming, while the latter may be better if you don’t know your PHP from your Python. Most people will select a balanced CMS, or one closer to the latter, but this comes down to what you know and what you are looking for.
Your Website’s Needs
Content comes in many forms across the Internet, and you don’t want to select a CMS that is not optimized for your needs. For example, if you are running an ecommerce website, then choosing a blogging CMS may not be the right decision. While the blogging CMS may come with ecommerce add-ons, it will rarely be as ideal for this purpose as the ecommerce one would.
There is no such thing as a “general” CMS, and you should only choose one from your Web hosting service that is made exactly for your purposes. Choosing a CMS for a different purpose is like choosing a knife for eating ice cream; you can do it, and it may be able to partially fulfill your needs, but it’s not the best and you will eventually tire of its incompatibility.
Scalability
Unless you're doing something very wrong, nearly every website starts small and then "grows up" and gets progressively larger amount of traffic. You need to select the proper Web hosting and CMS to seamlessly grow from your website’s infancy to its adulthood. While most CMS programs are able to handle a massive amount of traffic, not all of them can, so plan accordingly. To check this, read
web hosting reviews online and find out how the CMS interacts with the database, as database access is important when finding out how quickly the CMS can move. Speed is required, otherwise your visitors will feel the lag and may leave your website for greener (and faster) pastures.
Community Driven Tools
Web 2.0, and the
soon-to-be Web 3.0, is a community driven approach to the Internet, and your perfect CMS has to fulfill this need. Failing to foster a community may cut into your profits, because if you can keep visitors involved, then you will have a core group of dedicated buyers that can keep making you a profit over a sustained period of time.
First, look for a CMS from your Web hosting service that is able to handle a large amount of people, because community driven websites typically gain a following. Also, look for tools such as forums, social networking and polls so that your visitors have something to do once they arrive on your site.
Picking the Big Guy or the Small Guy
There are two prevalent thoughts online that tend to muck up decisions. Some people like going with the "big guy", or the system that has millions of members and years of experience, because it has proven to be a popular system with so many other people. The other trend is going with the "small guy", or the underdog, because these platforms typically have radical new tools and many people like rooting for the underdog.
So, which one is best when selecting a CMS? Neither. You shouldn’t choose a CMS based on its popularity, or lack of popularity, at all. Instead, look at the core system itself without bias and choose the CMS that works best for you and your site, not the one that everyone or no one is using.
CMS Updates
Choosing a CMS that is consistently updated is a good decision if you plan to run your website for years. While each update may seem insignificant, failing to get any updates can prove disastrous. This is because the Internet is an ever-changing environment, and not changing along with it can keep your website from reaching its full potential. For example, assume a new version of HTML comes out (as with
the recent HTML5). Most CMS programs have at least some HTML coding, so if the CMS is not updated to fulfill the new coding requirements, then your CMS may display elements incorrectly or your website may become inaccessible to users entirely. CMS updates also affect a range of other problems. Unless you want to be plagued by a system that may fail in the future, it is best to choose one with a good deal of updates.
Conclusion
Finding the best CMS isn’t difficult, but you need to do your research and you need to take your distinct needs into account. Just look for a CMS that is well-suited to your purposes, which has add-ons and updates, and which can scale upwards to accommodate your increasingly large community of users. By following these important guidelines, finding the best CMS should be a breeze.