How To Choose The Correct CMS For Your Site

Content Management Systems (CMS) permit the users to take care of their own custom sites — after professionals have created them — the end-user can maintain them and make changes. As an example, you can make a site that lets the client add or update employee contact information, schedules of events, and other dynamic content independently, without any knowledge of HTML.

Choose from several (some even free) CMS systems. Choose one based on your website needs. This isn’t a complete list. You can choose from a variety of Content Management Systems with differing capabilities. You can determine that the CMS you select will meet your needs by looking at the author’s websites.

Joomla can be used for many things. You can use it for any kind of site. Whether we are talking about a site for personal purposes or business (large or small) purposes, e-zines or other publications, all the way up to E-commerce websites. However, if the purpose of your site is going to be e-commerce, you may do better with a dedicated e-commerce package like Zen Cart or osCommerce. It is simple to install Joomla especially if your web host has Fantastico, in which case the setup can be totally automatic.

PHP-based Website Baker affords a lot of design simplicity. Since it is PHP based, you have the ability to play with the page to make it look like what you want if either you are fairly competent with PHP or if you want to pay a PHP programmer (which might turn out to be less expensive and easier than you might think — check out guru.com). There are a lot of add-ons that can be installed on a Website Baker site including, for example, photo albums, a message board, a catalog, an online payment option, etc.

Drupal. Avoid Drupal unless you are an expert or have special training in how to use it. They even confess on their web page that it takes a while to learn the program.

Mambo is very versatile, easy to use, and popular. Given the array of available themes, only a few small modifications are necessary to create a really great website.

phpWebSite is very versatile and powerful. Additions consist of document manager, photo album, polls, calendar, and a form generator. Like every Content Management System, it takes a while to learn the program. Unless you have experience in PHP, then you won’t be able to do much personalization.

Stephen Grisham, Sr. is a copy writer for InfoServe Media, LLC. InfoServe Media is a Houston, TX web design and web hosting company. If you just need periodic updates to an existing site, InfoServe Media also offers website maintenance.