Need A CMS for Your Website? Right Rules To Follow to Pick It

by JONATHAN PAUL Jonathan Paul working at PHPProgrammers, a leading

Selecting the right CMS is necessary if you want a flawless website for your business. This article takes a step in helping you in that.

CMS is the building block or the foundation of a website. So, the pressure on every website owner is to select a rightful content management system (CMS) that will help you manage everything of your site smoothly and effortlessly. So, which is the best CMS for your site? This article explains to you some cool tips on how to select a perfect CMS for building your website. But remember, while choosing a CMS you need some clearly defined requirements.

Recognise your stakeholders involved

The first step towards hooking with the right CMS is figuring out well who the stakeholders of the web project are. You also need to acknowledge their opinions and requirements in the selection process to ensure that the website best serves them all. Major stakeholders involved in decision making of CMS are IT members of the business, marketing team, and salespersons.

Prioritise business purpose/requirements with usage

For keying in the bespoke CMS for your website prioritise every requirement of your target audience with criteria such as must-have (features you can’t go without), should-have (features that are important but can wait for some time), could have (desirable features) and would-have (least critical features). Typically, you need to figure out the requirements as per the usage scenario.

Know the key rules of optimisation

Your content management should not be influenced just by technologies or expertise you have at your end. Different techniques are there for designing and content presentation and you need to know the best practices for amalgamating the two to give an optimum solution. Also, your CMS should be flexible enough in laying as well as retrieving the content.

Decide between Hosted and On-premise software

Now. This is the toughest part of the CMS decision making. Both On-premise and hosted software have own pros and cons. While with an on-premise system, you have bought the license from third-party providers and get it installed on your server or that of your hosting provider, in hosted/cloud hosted CMS, you just buy the license and directly install the CMS at the web host or server space that you have hired on the lease. So, the decision is yours. But, shortlist the CMS frameworks based on your budget and proximity of your server services providers.

Consider the future needs

Settle with the CMS platform that assures to evolve with your growing business needs in the future too. The CMS is not a one time investment, but it's a major asset and so you need to make sure that it will be easily modified and moulded to make changes in the website as and when required. Nevertheless, this implies customisation is the key consideration while selecting the CMS.

While following these steps is essential for picking the right solution of web content management, you should not the four main pillars of an effective CMS, which are, vision, support, stability and focus. No doubt, choosing a CMS is a painstaking task, but hopefully abiding by the above tips will help you strike the right note.

Jonathan Paul is one of senior Drupal developers in Australia, who works for PHPProgrammers, a top-ranking web development solutions company and has immense knowledge about PHP development, CMSes, eCommerce, and other technologies.