The most commonly asked question when it comes to Content Management System is what CMS is best for me, open source or proprietary?
Many big businesses tend to go for the latter, small businesses tend to think both come at an excessive cost or are too complicated, but this is just not true.
In fact I’d go as far to say that open source CMSs are perfect for small and medium businesses. Joomla!, Drupal and WordPress are very simple to install and maintain, I hope the following article will help you realise the benefits.
The content management systems mentioned above are without doubt the best three free website management systems available today, but finding out what features you need is the first step.
Scheduled publishing and un-publishing
One feature that’s very useful especially if you have lots of limited time offers, or other seasonal content.
Customisable layouts
Invaluable if you want to position content on ether side, at the top or bottom of your main content.
User roles
If you have or require many users to add to the site in a controlled manner, allowing author, editors and publishers work-flows.
Content caching
To streamline visitors access to your site, content caching limits workload on the hosting server allowing it to serve pages and other content as fast as possible.
Nested menus
Sometimes to allow your site to be as accessible as possible nested menus help by hiding sub-menus within main menu items.
Human and search friendly links
If you run multiple advertisements and want additional information to be available via your website you could use these. An example would be http://blog.grahamwalker.me/the-begining-of-the-end-for-wires, this will take you to my article on wireless power. This type of content will also be indexed correctly by the Google and other search engines spiders.
Blogging features
Business is entering the new media oriented and if implemented correctly can have a positive effect on your business.
Ease of use
These systems have very intuitive content submission layouts, showing you very quickly what your content will look like, very feature rich editing with the ability to add multiple types of media.
Searching
Built in search features allow visitors to find exactly what they want, quickly.
Community
Open source software is known for having very active not to mention friendly community support.
Many other add-ons are available to fulfill your needs, some features will be available with one CMS but not the other, so picking the correct one in the first place gives you the best start…