Content Management System (CMS)
Most small business owners do not have resources to have an in-house web design team. While web design companies do offer website maintenance and ongoing updates, it can cost a lot of money if updates are frequent and spread out across the website. Quick turn around time can also be an issue if you hire a large web design company as they might not prioritize your small updates over ongoing large projects. As you can tell, even very small web changes can leave you both frustrated, and is not economic in long run.
This is where a content management system (CMS) comes in handy. A content management system isolates presentation layer (look and feel) of your website from its content. Since most ongoing needs revolves around web content, CMS offers a highly flexible and efficient option that allows small business owners to update and maintain their own websites. While CMS is a outstanding option to publish and update web content, it is important to remember that it is not an ideal fit for everyone. If your business demands custom functionality on the web, you may be better off working with a web design company. Also, if you are not tech savvy and have little time on your own, it may be a good idea to have someone else handle your website updates.
What is a CMS?
As name suggests, a content management system is a software package specifically designed to manage a website. There are open source CMS products such as Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, etc as well as proprietary CMS products that require license to run and cost money upfront. What option you choose depends on your requirements and budget. Open source CMS softwares have significant online user community and third party plugins and enhancements can be purchased as stand alone pieces. We work with open source as well as license based CMS products and can do extensive custom programming to deliver functionality that may not be available with the standard product.
Open Source CMS Solutions:
Wordpress
Wordpress is the one of the most popular CMS application on the web. While it was originally developed as a blog application, recent developments and third party support have significantly enhanced the core functionality. Today you can design complex content driven website on Wordpress platform. From online shopping sites to large scale intranet applications, wordpress is able to deliver a stable and consistent user experience.
Joomla
Like Wordpress, Joomla is also based on PHP/MySQL based architecture. Joomla can be used for creating community-based portals, corporate websites, online stores and more. It has numerous build-in features and a large selection of extra modules and components to extent the functionality to meet your business needs. From performance standpoint, Joomla is more resource intensive when compared to Wordpress and may need VPS or dedicated hosting for high traffic data driven websites. Joomla is also more complex when upgrading from one release to next due to components and modules that may or may not be compatible with a version.
Drupal
Drupal is an ideal choice to build a community websites. It can also be used to build simple static content websites as well as complex dynamic data driven websites. Drupal is easy to customize due to theme based design architecture. Built-in search tool as well as search-engine friendly URL's modules can also improve website ranking in search engines. Open Publish is an outstanding CMS solution for magazine websites and is used for some of the most popular magazine websites in the web. Drupal is also resource intensive and shared hosting usually doesn't work well for Drupal based websites.
Moodle
Moodle is a Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS). It is a open source web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites. Moodle websites can handle a wide variety of requirements from payment processing to course progress tracking. Moodle.org is online community site where Moodle is made and discussed.
osCommerce
osCommerce is an open source online shop e-commerce solution that is available for free with a feature rich set of out-of-the-box online shopping cart functionality that allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain online stores with minimum effort and with no costs, fees, or limitations involved. osCommerce has a large and growing online community that consists of over 250,000 store owners, developers, service providers, and enthusiasts who support and work with each other on their online business. There are thousands of third party add-ons and enhancements available as well.