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03.28.07
Choosing a CMS to Build Your Website
 By
Yuri Filimonov
Nothing irks a non-tech savvy person so much as an “opportunity” to manage his website him- or herself: creating each page individually from a template, copying the file to the FTP server, placing links from other pages manually and what not.
That’s what keeps content management systems alive: they make the whole process of building and managing website easy for a non-developer type of person. In this post, you can learn how to choose the right content management for yourself and your website.
What is a content management system?
A content management system is the web software that lets you create a website without knowing any web programming skills, such as HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL and such. Instead, you can put up a website by simply pasting your post/article from the Notepad and pressing the “Publish” button.
Normally, CMSs have their own structure, such as blogs (blogging software), forums (forum software) and general content management systems, such as Joomla, etc. However, there are other systems that let you create your own site structure and layout, such as Drupal.
Before we go into picking the system, you need to define what you need before doing anything.
Define what you need
Before you even start searching for a content management system, you need to know why you are creating a website.
• Is it for your business?
• For your hobby?
• Do you want to sell any digital or tangible stuff?
Also, you’ll need to know what all you and your visitors want to do on the website.
• Do you want to just publish articles?
• Do you want to have a blog?
• Do you want a forum?
• Any classifieds section?
• An online shop, maybe?
• Do you want to build and inform a mailing list?
• Do you want others to do anything on your site?
Obviously, each of the choices will place several requirements for a CMS, such as an e-commerce (online store) module, a blog, a forum, other customization stuff and more extensions, such as mailing lists and user permissions.
So, before you even start to seek a CMS, create a list of what all you and your want to do on your website. Use your imagination. How would you and your people really like to communicate and share things on a website.
Once you have identified what you want to do, you’ll need to translate the wishes to specific system features, such as basic content publishing, a blog, a forum or a shop module with additional plug-ins (many systems allow anyone contribute a plugin or a module to enhance the platform).
After you have a list of features/wishes in front of you, you can start shopping.
Continue reading this article.
About
the Author:
Yuri Filimonov is a freelance website optimization and usability consultant, who writes about improving websites to gain more visitors, customers and profit at his blog, http://www.ImproveTheWeb.com.
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