Top Tips In Choosing The Best CMS: Part 1

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

A content management system is very important. Needless to say, choosing what CMS to use requires a lot of careful planning and analysis. One golden rule that you should always keep in mind is not to do the choosing at times when the urgency is at its peak. Do your choosing when your checklist is complete and you are not blinded by any irrational blunders.

To be more specific, here are the specific checklist guides that you can use to help you get the best CMS for your site.

Check how much further you can mess up with the pages. There are some CMS’s that only allow you to edit at a certain level. Although this is good to keep the simplicity and manageability of your site and the pages of your site, at most times it can be irritating. For beginners, you might now foresee this as a problem but in the long run, as your business matures and your experience also widens, you will find the major need to play a lot on the core functionality of their CMS. Test the CMS before you purchase for this feature. Also put into mind that even with such feature, your CMS does not have to be difficult to manage.

Too much or too little control over the editing makes room for problems. This of course is not a problem inherent in the CMS. It is in the user. People complain when they do not have much control over the design of their website. However, with the kind of editing that most CMS’s has nowadays, it gives room for too many options. This often leads to too much emphasis on the design rather on the content. Thus, you as the user should be able to manage a little of both on the sides.

Never ever make downloading and uploading images and files be the cause of your troubles. Make sure that they can be easily accessed and used whenever you want them and for whatever purposes. Try to see how well images and files look at the users’ end. Are there some add-ons such as captions, descriptions and the likes for images and files when you upload them?

The searching function in your CMS should be efficient. By efficient it means that your search should be able to come up with items that are fresh, those that are the latest entries in search engines. Also, you need to check how through the searching is. Does it include file extensions, Ecxel, PPT and the likes? How fast can the searching happen? How wide is the searching done – does it have refined searching? Are there any things that you need to be aware with regards to the ranking of the searches? Do you have some sort of control as to what results are displayed?