5 Tips To Help You Choose Your CMS

Although this is primarily directed towards the web designers & web developers of the world, if you are simply curious about creating your own presence on the internet, this will be a good first step for you. I'm going to outline, through my experience, the 5 best ways to make a decision on what CMS (Content Management System) you should use for your next web project.

First and foremost, you really, really need to know and understand what, exactly, the purpose of your site will be. Are you a novice blogger with no knowledge of a web coding language? Are you a web designer who's comfortable with modern HTML/XHTML/CSS standards? Are you a web developer who lives and breathes the crazy web languages like PHP and AJAX? Ask yourself "What do I want to really be on the internet?". Depending on the answer to "who you are", take a look at some of the options below to help you choose the best CMS solution for your project :

Once you have figured out what the site will be for, start to dissect what each CMS system is capable of.

Ask yourself these questions :

• Do I have the ability to set this up on my own?


• Can I easily maintain my site?


• Is there a good online community that can answer any of my questions?


• How much time can i dedicate to building/maintaining the site?

Once you understand what each CMS has to offer, start reading reviews for each. You will come across some excellent information on what other people have done to spice up their sites. The information you will gather from others will be very important in understanding the benefits of each CMS you are looking at using.

No CMS is perfect. From the most well-known, community-driven CMS to the smaller, niche CMS, there are always issues. Of course, the more well-known the CMS, the more solutions there are to any of the problems that may come up. It's always helpful to take a look at the forums/message boards to see what everyone else using the CMS is going through. This will certainly help you familiarize yourself with not only what the community is thinking, but also what type of project(s) others are using the CMS for.

Every CMS will come with a basic template (a pre-made website) for you to start using. The purpose of these pre-made templates is to give you an idea of how the CMS works. More often than not, they are not graphically sound and are really not meant to be the graphical solution for a website.

If you are a novice web designer and do not want to worry about customizing your site (only populating it with text), always research the CMS that has the best template options. A CMS with a large community will always have a plethora of free template's to choose from, many of which come with some excellent web2.0 graphics.

For the experienced web designer/web developer, always look a bit closer into a CMS that allows for very easy customization. Make sure you know what coding language the CMS uses. Some CMS options will require you to learn a CMS-specific markup ... something that is not used on any other CMS. This is not meant to make your life more difficult, but actually much easier. Yes, there is always a learning curve at the beginning, but once you get the hang of how it works, your projects will actually move much quicker than they would with a traditional PHP-based CMS.

This is always an interesting subject to discuss. What are the advantages/disadvantages of a free CMS compared to a CMS you pay for? There is one major factor that will set them aside from each other : support.

If you are going to use a CMS that has a massive community, understand that if you come across a problem, you may have to find the solution yourself. In many cases the solution will be easy to find, but if you come across a unique issue you will lose valuable time trying to fix it instead of creating your site.

If you choose to pay for your CMS (typically anywhere from $50-$300), you have already taken the first step to saving some very valuable time. The reason you pay for a CMS is because there is a team of people behind the scenes always working on improving the product. If there is an issue, they want to know about it, and find the solution themselves so that the next customer will not go through the same thing. Unlike a free CMS where you are just a consumer, a paid CMS makes you a customer. All the creators of the CMS want to do is make you happy, and will help you on your project. If you decide to pay for a CMS, choose a company that offers a great support system.

The tips above should help you on your way to deciding on what CMS is best for your project. Remember, the best solution is not always the most popular one. Before you follow the masses, research every option. Your perfect CMS is out there, you just need to find it!