Web Effectiveness Blog

My daily Web content management alert from Google included a link to the latest InformationWeek CMS blog from Peter Hagopian, titled, "Content Management Recommendations That Pull No Punches." This blog was a review of another blog by Jason Mosley, titled "How to Choose the Right CMS," on Web Designer Depot.

If you’ve spent more than a few minutes assessing your options for Web CMS software, you’ve learned the market is flooded with products. These include dozens, if not hundreds of open-source options and an equally expansive collection of commercial products.

Jason’s blog does a great job of establishing a context for making decisions about choosing the right CMS: “The main reason for using a CMS is to make creating and editing of content simple and easy. Often developers forget that this is the main purpose of a CMS and in search of more and more functionality they cripple themselves (or their customers). Content doesn’t just include text however. Sometimes the content you need on a site is a contact form or user authentication system. The trick is to find the CMS that provides the functionality without sacrificing ease of use for yourself or, depending on the situation, your customer. A good CMS will allow you to spend more time focused on the design of the frontend then on implementing extensions or functionality.”

Within his blog Jason offers the 5 Most Common Mistakes made when selecting a CMS:

► Mistake 1: Choosing a Geek Friendly CMS

► Mistake 2: Bigger is Better "What really matters is the people behind the product and that they are the right people for the job. Not how many people you have working for you."

► Mistake 3: Going With the Little Guy "Always make sure to check that the CMS you are looking into does include extensions with the functionality you will need."

► Mistake 4: Not Doing Research

► Mistake 5: Allowing an IT Guy to Pick the CMS

In addition to these mistakes, I would add:

► Mistake 6: Underestimating Open Source Total Cost of Ownership

Open source starts out free, so it’s cheaper than commercial software, right? Not always. Depending upon the extent of services required for meeting your needs, the cost of customizing and building out your open source CMS might exceed that of a commercial CMS like SiteExecutive, which is fast to deploy. Likewise, when it comes to ongoing updates and maintenance, reliance on third-party developers can drive up the cost of operating your open source CMS. And, what about those updates. What happens when some software glitch causes your site to go down? Does the community support model really meet your needs for uptime – and what is the cost of downtime?