How to choose a CMS?

Contemporary websites can hardly do without a CMS – content management system. This is not surprising, as content management systems allows to ease the maintenance of the ready site considerably, and to make in more easy-to-manage. How to choose a CMS?

Quite often the choice of a CMS is determined by the choice of the system only. Therefore all CMS are divided into two main groups: free and paid. Please pay your attention to the fact that “paid” does not necessarily mean “low-quality”. The choice of a free or paid CMS depends first of all on the budget that the company plans to spend on website creation.

For instance, large and very large companies allow themselves to choose a CMS that has been created individually for these very companies in compliance with their requirements and requests. It is the most expensive kind of CMS because the development of the CMS is performed from scratch.

Among the advantages of such CMS we can mention, first of all, their individuality – such systems are appropriate for solving non-standard tasks of website development, for complex and large Internet portals and online shops.

Among the disadvantages of individually developed CMS we can name their above-mentioned high cost of development, as well as the considerable duration of the process of their development. The creation of the system kernel can take several months; to implement the CMS on the site you will need more additional time.

Medium-scale and small-scale companies can choose a CMS of the commercial type. It is commercial CMS that are appropriate for solving most of the typical tasks during website development. Such systems are much cheaper in comparisons with individual CMS, besides, they are not developed from scratch; such systems are connected to the site in finished form.

Free CMS, as a rule, are chosen by small companies, individual entrepreneurs, individual physical bodies. The most important advantage of such systems is, of course, the absence of acquisition costs. However, in comparison with commercial CMS, in this case you may need more time for implementation of the CMS on the site, because the components of free content management systems can be “raw”, unfinished.

However, the last problem is quite solvable: free CMS have excellent maintenance. They are maintained by both developers and the army of the users. It provides rapid elimination of uncovered vulnerabilities.

Along with the cost of a CMS, there is one more important criteria of selection of a certain content management system. It is the assessment of the interaction of a CMS with the hosting platform as well as with the administrator of the owner of the site.

For instance, various hosting platforms can either maintain or not maintain certain CMS. Therefore during the selection of a CMS you should take into account the facilities of your hosting platform. If the CMS has been chosen beforehand, you should search for the hosting that will support this very CMS.

Interaction of the CMS with the owner or the administrator of the site takes place at all stages of the website's life circle: implementation of the CMS, installation on the hosting, maintenance and modification of the site. That is why to choose a CMS you should compare several systems using such parameters as:

• duration of “deploy” of the site from the CMS on the hosting platform;
• facility of creation of a local copy of the site;
• availability of access to the source codes of the CMS and the opportunity to improve its functional;
• availability of high-quality documentation;
• availability of backup mechanisms;
• availability of convenient and understandable site management interface.

It is very hard to assess all above-mentioned parameters in a proper way and to choose a CMS if you do not specialize in web design and website development. Besides, in most cases the site owner simply has no opportunity to check every CMS in action. That is why you should entrust the choice of the appropriate CMS to the professional developers of the company's website.

Web design studio WebStudio2U offers complex development, promotion and maintenance of websites, redesign and modernization of websites, transference of websites to modern content management systems. We will help you to choose a CMS which will comply with all goals and tasks of your site and be convenient and accessible even for those users who have no web programming skills.

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how to choose a cms, choose cms, cms choice, free cms, commercial cms