The second installment in a series of posts explaining the different types of digital assets that are required to setup, support and fuel the online presence for your business or brand.
You have your website design, you have your content, but you don’t know how to bring the two together? Content Management Systems might be the right option for you. Gone are the times where a swanky website design was enough to draw in your audience. Competition in the online world is fierce, ranking high in search engines and remaining attractive to your audience is essential and that means you have to keep your content up to date. This is where content management systems come in.
What are Content Management Systems?
Essentially, Content Management Systems (CMSs) are powerful web development tools, enabling users to create, edit and store web content. For most CMSs, this can be done without much or any knowledge of how to code. Plugins or themes are available for many CMSs which increase the functionality and provide a variety of pre-coded design options. Content Management Systems give an end-user the flexibility of changing content with ease, whilst enabling developers to deliver quality products to their clients in a convenient and efficient way.
Which CMS is right for me?
There a numerous CMSs available, some are tailored to specific functionality such as blogging or selling products/services online (e-commerce), whilst others can be customized to provide the function you require. In order to decide which Content Management System is right for you and your business, ask yourself the following question:
What kind of site do I need?
From a one page website with simple information, to blogs, to shopping sites, there are many options and its vital for you to determine what it is that you want to achieve with your site. To narrow it down, consider the following:
What functionality do I want to provide to the user?
- easy navigation through blog content
- sign up options to newsletters
- a shopping cart and payment options
- contact form
…the list is endless. Determine everything that you want your site to do, how you want your user to interact with it and the features that make you stand out from your competitors.
Once you have established what it is that you want your online presence to look like you can dive further and explore the different CMSs available. In particular, explore their functionality and ease of use based on your knowledge of code, to ensure you choose the most effective system for your needs and your niche. When conducting your research consider the following:
- Is there a cost involved with the CMS?
- How are CMS updates managed? Are they easy to do myself? How do they affect plugins?
- What design and functionalities are available? Are there many options?
- How easy is it to implement your own code?
- Check out Demo sites – nothing beats first hand experience
Top 10 Content Management Systems*
WordPress
Market Share: 60.4%*
One to Watch
Adobe Experience Manager
AEM is a component of the Adobe Marketing Cloud. It is a powerful website building tool and one of the fastest growing web platforms today. In fact, Adobe recently acquired aforementioned Magento, adding an e-commerce platform to it’s marketing suite. Unlike the most popular platforms listed above, AEM comes at a cost. However, with Adobe being a major computer software company with close ties to Microsoft, this CMS is definitely a tool to watch.
Honorable Mention
Dreamweaver
Adobe Dreamweaver CC used to be a big content management tool and is still heavily used by web professional for designing, publishing and managing websites. It can read WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal templates and includes a grid system to create responsive layouts for different screen sizes, making this a very efficient tool for web developers.
Market Lead
WordPress is clearly the market leader, taking over 60% of the market, with hundreds of competitor CMSs sharing the remaining 40%. However, as competitors gain momentum, it will be interesting to see how long WordPress can sustain it’s lead.
In conclusion, there are numerous options out there that cater for a variety of applications and skill levels. Another consideration when choosing a content management system is your web hosting provider, this is a topic that will be covered in a future post.
*Market Share statistics as of March 2019 (source: w3techs, web technology surveys)
About the author
Rowland Forbes
Digital Manager for Method and co-founder of Fringe Media. I enjoy the process of discovering a client’s needs and exploring how technology can make their ideas come to life.
