Which CMS is best for me?

When choosing your next website, it’s pretty common now to want to be able to update some of it yourself, whether it be your latest news, a photo gallery or your service list. Each company will offer their own solution to your CMS, but which one is best?

We’ve narrowed it down to 2 options what we call a Full CMS or a Custom CMS.

Full CMS

Typically your web supplier will use an off the shelf package such as Expression Engine, Drupal or even WordPress and once built this kind of CMS allows you to add pages, change information on every page and you also get loads of functionality right off the shelf.  Sounds great, huh?

Well maybe. As these systems are off the shelf it may sometimes take a little longer to stitch your design around it and depending on the CMS and the skill of the developer, they may not get the site perfectly matching your brand. This kind of CMS will come stacked with functionality, but a lot of it you may not even want and sometimes you have to shoehorn your website into the way the CMS works.

One of the main issues our clients have is when they come to add a new page to the site. They are met with a blank page and they have to muster up some design skills to make the page look pretty and interesting.  For us this is where a Full CMS falls down as most pages just end up with a big block of text with the occasional picture at the top, not massively exciting :)

Custom CMS

This is the kind of CMS we prefer and gives us and the customer a lot more scope.  During initial discussions about a website we always ask the client which sections of their website will change the most and which won’t change very often.  For example, the news and gallery will change frequently and the services, about us and contact us would only need a refresh once per year

So we would build a little CMS for just the news and gallery and then we would beautifully design all the other pages so you don’t have to worry about them. The CMS sections would work exactly how you required them and would be extremely easy to update and all styles and design are automatically added when you add new articles or photos to the CMS.

But you might think that a custom CMS would be more expensive than an off the shelf Full CMS, but that’s not the case.  We have lots of modules already created that we can drop in and design to perfectly match your site. If you want something a little different we’ll tweak the modules to match what you need.  Simples!

But you then may ask about the cost of updating the other 3 pages. 3 pages just having a refresh once a year would likely only take an hour. A lot cheaper than the outlay for making these updateable :)

To chat about which CMS is best for you and to see how Way Fresh can help, please give us a shout today!

Cheers
Simon
Way Fresh - CMS solutions for Newcastle and Northumberland