The decision of whether or not to build your website with a content management system (CMS) can often feel quite overwhelming, there many factors to consider and dozens of CMS solutions to choose from. I'll do my best to shed some light on the confusion and simplify the process. First off, if you are unfamiliar with CMS essentially it allows clients to edit their own website content including text, images, linked files, etc. via a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, similar to microsoft word.

Generally CMS systems are recommended when

- your site is page heavy,  ex: 50+ pages

- many of these pages need regular updating, as in daily or weekly

- last minute updates are critical to your business

- you need to be able to make updates to the site from a web browser on any computer

- you are releasing versions of the site in multiple languages, (some cms platforms such as joomla allow you to automatically create translated versions of your site at the push of a button.) here's an example of a site we recently finished with a joomla cms back-end: www.sjhmg.com

A few down-sides CMS systems include:

- significant design / aesthetic limitations

- higher up-front costs

- limits scalability for custom solutions in the future

Hybrid solutions are also something to consider. If for example the "news" page is the only page on your site requiring frequent updates you might want to consider setting it up as a blog via wordpress.org or if there are 2-3 pages that require frequent updating we can build a custom solution to help you edit only those 2-3 pages.

For a comparison of major open-source and enterprise cms solutions i recommend cmsmatrix.org, If you are considering a CMS platform for your business feel free to give us a call!