Tread Carefully When Choosing A Content Management Solution For Your Business

Planning a company’s website strategy can be a tough. If you’re trying to decide on a content management system as the foundation to your organisation’s online presence, you’ve probably trawled through many possible options.

So what features are important? What CMS is right for your needs? Here’s some ideas to point you in the right direction:

What Are Your Goals?
How much content are you going to be publishing? What is the strategy for getting that content in front of your potential customers? If you’re leaving publication in the hands of your staff, then you need to consider ease of use. If you’re employing an outside company to help you, you need to consider the industry standard options. Once you’ve picked a CMS, you’re going to find it a real headache to change course if the feature set doesn’t allow for future expansion, or doesn’t offer the ease of use you require from day one.

Decide On A Budget
Open source software will offer huge savings over a proprietary system. You’ll have a wider range of customisation options and the opportunity to tailor every detail to your own needs. Open source solutions like Wordpress also allow you to tap into a huge pool of developer options, as this type of open source solution is hugely popular with a massive user base. On the flip side, a paid-for enterprise solution will likely be less customisable and cost more in terms of both monthly outlay and technical development, but will come with very strong security features and dedicated support staff for more complex applications.

Check Out The Competition
If large corporate organisations are using a particular CMS with a high frequency, it’s a good sign it’s a safe option. You need to know that your solution will be supported for years to come and that it has an active user base, or you could be left in the dark if it falls out of favour with developers and designers.

Behind The Scenes
Before you dive in and sign up for a CMS, you need to understand that the hosting required may differ in terms of software requirements and ease of set up. Not every CMS will work with every type of programming language, especially where databases are concerned. You need to make some investigations about this before you enter into a long contract with your hosting company.

Can You Use The CMS For Marketing Campaigns?
CMS systems from companies like Siteglide feature complex and comprehensive tools for managing your marketing campaigns. For more information please refer to : http://www.siteglide.com. If you need the ability to send emails, monitor your results and manage secure areas and ecommerce, then you might be better signing up for a paid-for, enterprise style service.

Can You Migrate?
It shouldn’t be a huge issue, but it’s worth making some checks to determine if your current content can be easily migrated and organised on the new CMS. This could be a potential headache that leaves you with unacceptable amounts of downtime and chaos.

Choosing a CMS for your business is a process that requires some careful planning and consideration. Check the competition, weigh up the available options, and only make a decision after you’ve checked out all of the options.

Wendy Lin is a freelance writer who specialises in guest blogging. She is a CIO of 2 businesses and is also a watercolour painter.