A Guide to Choosing the Best .NET CMS

With the demands of the online consumers emerging and expanding, enterprises all over the globe are looking for something that could promote their brands and products through a strong online presence. So to survive, every business has to deliver a seamless digital experiences across various channels. It is imperative to select a CMS having features that specifically align with your business goals. Though there are many .NET based CMS that are either open source or license based, it is crucial to choose one that is best for your organization.

But how can you best establish your list of requirements and what should you look for in a .net based CMS?  Here ae a few things that are particularly important:

Consider the core functionality:

Many online business owners have the misconception that all .NET CMS platforms perform the same function of creating, editing and publishing the pages and content. Although this is the basic function of all CMS, there are a range of functionalities that every platform cannot support like ecommerce, multilingual support, events ticketing and etc. 

Another important thing is that, unused functionality doesn’t offer excess weight but it slows down or makes the system unnecessarily cumbersome. So, simply creating a list of what you need and what you don’t from your CMS and making necessary provisions for the future needs will help to make the right decision.

The editor features:

This is one core feature that online website owners should consider and the majority .NET CMS development platforms have the WYSIWYG editor. But this is often ill conceived. The editor is the interface that helps to add content and amend it. It helps the users to apply basic format like font types, colors and etc. You can also customize the appearance of the page and achieve a level of design control. But new generation editors have a different approach and the content providers use it to mark the headings, links, lists and other elements.

Flexibility and extensibility:

Certain CMS platforms have limitation and have different terns of ways the content is retrieved and presented. But the presentation of the content or its functionalities should not be dictated by technology. Flexibility of the CMS lies in its ability to create a custom design and it should also offer the administrators an interface that modifies, changes and chooses the front end layout to suit and match the marketing and branding requirements.

Your .NET CMS like Sitefinity, Kentico, Dotnetnuke, Umbraco should permit a certain degree of configuration and customization to suit specific needs. It should offer something that is beyond the common functionality and at the same time should have the capability of integrating additional features into the site or an application.

Also Read: Understanding The Core Differences Between .NET Framework and .NET Core

User interaction: 

If you want your users to remain hooked to your site, then you CMS must offer a great user interaction or allows a third party CMS plugin integration to provide it. Some functionalities that you may require is the chat, forum, comments and ratings. Consider how you want your website to be used by the users and based on that, you can select the best CMS.

Multiple website support:

Many companies are looking forward to CMSes that offer a multiple website support. You may decide to launch a new site to target a new audience base and with the growth of mobile devices, your CMS should have the flexibility to run multiple sites on varied devices. Whatever be the reason, the .NET CMS platform should have the flexibility to run multiple websites.

Summary:

.NET CMSes are highly popular among online website owners as they come with rich features. but before choosing one for your business do consider some crucial points for maximum benefits.