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How to choose a content management system for your website

By Marc Carson · Monday July 22, 2013

When building or redesigning a website, it is absolutely crucial to pick a content management system (CMS) that is an appropriate match. A CMS is a tool that allows you to add and edit the contents of your website. The CMS should be a natural fit to your site’s architecture. It should accomodate the type of pages you’ll be creating. It should also allow you to deal easily with images, files, videos, and other types of media you intend to use.

A good CMS will save you lots of time and usually pays for itself within weeks or months.

A bad CMS

It’s very easy to pick the wrong CMS. In my 10 years of working with CMS software, I’ve seen many extremely poor content management systems break and cause businesses to lose money.

Don’t rely on indicators such as popularity, cost, or recommendations from vendors. Here’s how you know you’ve picked the wrong CMS:

• Your website is frustrating to manage
• The structure of your CMS seems inflexible
• Your CMS enforces a style of website content that doesn’t match exactly what you want to do
• It is difficult to work with images, files, and videos within your CMS
• When you need to make changes to the website, you feel like you have to relearn it from scratch every time
• Your CMS requires frequent technical maintenance just to keep your website running
• Your website is targeted by hackers and they have caused downtime or problems with your website

A good CMS

You know your CMS is a good fit if you can do the following:

• Easily add new pages to your website, with text, imagery, files, and videos
• Easily add new sections to your website—pages with sub-pages that allow you to thoroughly address a subject
• Spend only a few minutes every day publishing the content that draws visitors to your website
• Arrange your website’s pages in a way that makes the most sense given the type of work you do, the type of visitors you want to attract, and the resources you have at hand

There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of CMS software packages. I’ve used many of them. I encourage anyone who has established a marketing budget to be very careful about the type of CMS you use. Ask vendors to give you a demonstration of their CMS software. Ask them to let you sit in front of it and use it for some key tasks.

My own approach

When I sit my clients down in front of the CMS software I recommend (usually one of several that I know and use myself), I ask them to complete several common tasks. I do this without giving them any instructions. If they cannot complete these tasks 100% within seconds, I consider the demo a failure! No one should have to read a manual to accomplish the basics. This gives me an incentive to stay current, evaluate CMS software by its ease of use, and provide my clients with solutions that let them start publishing web content in minutes.

By the way, my name is Marc Carson, and I own a web design business in northern California. I provide my clients with website management tools that allow them to publish, painlessly.