Creating the perfect website that looks good and represents your business is important. Your website acts as the shop window for your business, representing who you are and what you can offer. Creating the perfect website can be difficult if you don’t have the right IT skills. That is where Content Management Systems can help!
What is a Content Management System (CMS)?
Content Management Systems take away the confusing low level details involved in maintaining your website. This means you can upload content easily as and when you choose and have full control of what goes onto your website, without having a large amount of IT knowledge.
How to choose a CMS: 5 key considerations
There are five key areas to consider when choosing a CMS for your business: core needs, users, technologies, SEO and mobile responsiveness. These considerations will help you find the CMS that is right for you.
1. What are your core needs?
You need to consider what will be the core needs of your CMS. Will it be a fast website with hundreds of pages or a small blog? Does it need to cope with large media files etc. Different CMSs have been developed with different purposes in mind. You also need to consider whether your CMS will need to be customised to match your business or whether you will use predefined templates. Some CMSs are easier to customise than others and some will have a more extensive range of templates.
2. Who will use the CMS?
Next you need to understand who will be using your CMS and their level of IT knowledge. Different CMSs are designed for different levels of user. Are you looking for a CMS that has a high level front end while the complicated things happen in the background or are you looking for a CMS that you can completely customise and have it look and do what you tell it to? How intuitive and easy to use is the CMS? Will your users be able to use it and will you need to provide training?
3. What languages and technologies are used in your business?
You should bear in mind the technology that the CMS will use and whether this will fit in with what you currently use. Is it built using PHP and MySQL or ASP.NET technology? Will this fit in with the current technologies used within your business? For example, ASP.NET fits in with Microsoft technologies. This is important when considering whether your website needs to integrate with backend systems.
4. Does the CMS do Search Engine Optimisation?
You should take into consideration how much traffic you want to your website and therefore how well it will perform in search engines. The more hits you want your website to get, the better it needs to perform on search engine. Not all CMSs perform as well as others so if you depend on your website for bringing in business, then make sure you get a CMS that is SEO friendly.
5. Is your CMS mobile responsive?
An important factor to take into consideration is whether it will look good on mobile devices. With mobile devices such as mobile phones and tablets all varying in size, your website needs to look good on all of them. It’s now more important than ever to have a website that is responsive and looks as good on a small mobile screen, as it does on a large computer screen. Google will penalise websites that are not mobile-friendly.
For help choosing a content management system for your business or website development, get in touch today.
