You want your website to look as competent and professional as your company is, your company's carefully crafted brand shining forth on every page. When choosing between an open source and custom CMS, there are definite differences in terms of front-end site design.

As we mentioned in Part 1 of Choosing a CMS, there are numerous user-generated add-ons readily available with open source CMS.

Every kind of CMS is customizable, though all are customizable to a different extent.

Open Source CMS are typically completely customizable, provided you're willing to roll up your sleeves and code it yourself. If you're not up to the challenge of coding from scratch, there are also a number of pre-existing plugins that you can slot in when and where you need them. You'll again be climbing into the back-end and configuring and troubleshooting on your own - and after all the work you put in, the plugins may not actually do what you want them to do!

Today is a momentous day - we held a launch party in honour of Live CMS 5!

After months of hard work, testing and many late nights, Live CMS 5 went live yesterday. We've fired up the back end, notified our clients and watched the product soar. 5,500 user accounts have been migrated in 70 countries and 29 languages. We've been hearing a lot of great feedback and encouragement, and we truly believe this will be the most powerful iteration of our Live CMS product to date.

Many thanks to all of WebCanada (it seems like everyone contributed something) and special shout outs to the Live CMS 5 team: Paul, Nikola, Andy, Ian, Matt, Ilia, Linus, Billy, Rinaldi and Daniel.

Check out the photos after the read more link.

Now Magazine writer Joshua Errett's article about the concentration of WordPress usage in Canadian media may be overly alarmist and a bit silly (as with the example of the printing press running out of ink) however he does bring up a good point about some of the issues tied to WordPress.

The two most important considerations to make when choosing a CMS are the complexity of your website and the extent of your technical knowledge. Do you have a small website with a few pages or an extensive site with many pages showcasing a variety of media and functions?

Quick Response Codes have been a mainstay in the marketing world for a number of years. For those not familiar with QR Codes, they are unique matrix barcodes placed on marketing materials which can be scanned using a smartphone camera enabled by a QR Code reader. Once scanned, the QR reader reveals embedded information by linking to a website on your smartphone. We see QR Codes everywhere: adorning movie posters, on products at the supermarket and even on advertisements on the side of buses. There must be a better, more interactive way to share marketing information.

Welcome to the first post in our series on choosing and evaluating a CMS. Since you're here, we're guessing you're still scouting for information about the differences between open source and proprietary systems.

To help, we've put together what we think are top considerations and differences between the two:

Choosing a content management system (CMS) can be a difficult undertaking when you're diving in for the first time. There are so many options available, it's hard to know what the best solution is. What you do know is that you don't have time to update back-end coding each time you want to alter a page on your website.

You need a better way to manage and organize online content. You need a CMS!