Confabulate

Content Management System is one of the most powerful developers tool on Internet. The system provides you a platform to setup a site, to use a database, to standardize new web pages, by means of some prefabricated routines and tables. Choosing a content management system can be tricky. Unfortunately there are thousands of CMS’s floating around the web and finding the right one has become somewhat of an ordeal. Without having clearly defined business objectives, you will be seduced by fancy functionality and complexity of CMS that is not going to help you in the long run. Below you will see 7 tips which you need to keep in mind while selecting the best CMS for you:

1. Select Non-Geek Friendly CMS: It is quite important for the developers to note that customers for whom you are making site may not be as technological oriented as you are. So select a geek friendly CMS unless you are making website for yourself. This choice of CMS would help your customers to manage the site in the future. So choose a CMS with simple admin interface no matter you need to customize it more to meet customer’s requirements. The resulting product will definitely be the best for the customers. If you are selecting CMS yourself, you need to see that the particular CMS allows you to perform the core functions like creating, editing, deleting and organizing pages.
2. Management of Web Assets: Management of images and files is badly handled in some CMS. All those CMS which are not logically and perfectly designed can frustrate users with poor usability. Ensure that the content management system you select, forces content providers to add attributes to images. It should provide basic text and image editing tools. You need to see how the content management system deals with uploading and attaching PDFs, Word documents and other files.
3. Scope of Customization: It is simply not necessary now that all CMS have techniques to separate design and content. Some CMS developers have created systems that puts unreasonable constraints on the design and seriously impacts accessibility. Rather select a CMS which allows flexibility in content presentation and retrieval. For instance, ‘Is it possible to extract the most recent user comments and display them on the home page?’
4. Support for Multiple Websites: The selected CMS must provide support for multiple websites. And with the growth of the mobile Web, you may want to create a separate website especially for mobile devices. You may not be managing more than one website, but it may happen in the future. You may want to launch a new website targeting a special segment.
5. The editor: The editor is the interface through which content is added and amended. The content providers had full control over the design. With all these customizations, consistency of design and branding is usually ignored. So with new generation editor, Content providers use it to mark up headings, lists, links and other elements.
6. Search Functionality: It is very important to assess the search functionality of the CMS. You need to know answers to questions like how frequently your website is indexed by search engine or does it index the entire content of each page? Etc.
7. Social Interaction with Users: You need to check for the tools with which you communicate with the customers. It can be in the form of allowing users to comment on the post, or whether there’s a forum on the main website to ask questions or provision of hosting a community on your website.

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 1:51 am and is filed under cms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.