Part 2: Choosing the Best CMS for Your Business

The two most important considerations to make when choosing a CMS are the complexity of your website and 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?

You Have: A Small Website and Limited Skills
If you have a small website with a few standard elements (text, photos) but you don't have experience designing and configuring a site yourself, you're a good candidate for a proprietary system. A proprietary CMS can be built out to incorporate exactly what you need with everything to custom designs and tools through to qualified design and development support. The time requirement with a proprietary solution extends only to entering your content into the CMS.

You Have: A Small Website and IT Skills
If you have a small website like that described above and you don't mind getting your hands dirty, you might want to opt for an open source solution. You'll be able to manage your content relatively easily because your CMS won't be very complicated. Downloading, hosting and configuring the CMS will be the most intensive part of your endeavour.

You Have: A Large Website and IT Skills
If you have a large website and IT knowledge, you have the luxury of choice. You can easily incorporate an open source or a proprietary solution. With open source, you'll need to set aside time and resources to configure, troubleshoot and host the CMS, while a proprietary system will be delivered to you ready-to-use. The proprietary system will allow much greater customization of design and function whereas the open source offers a cheaper price. The choice is yours!

You Have: A Large Website and Limited Skills
For a company with a large website and limited technical expertise to manage the back end and plugins, a proprietary system is the way to go. Simply outline the elements you'd like included on the website, and a CMS development company will build in modules to fit your specific needs. When you need to add or remove an element, you only have to reach out to your account contact to organize an update. The only requirement for you is entering website content into the CMS as needed, and even that can be completed by a proprietary CMS provider.

We're not going to lie to you, we're partial to proprietary CMS sites. Just look at how nice they are!

Check back next Wednesday for part three in our series learn more about CMS customization and the differences between the platforms.