Choosing a CMS Part 4: Design Look & Feel
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. Included among these add-ons are thousands of front end design themes, all as varied as the individuals that created them.
With an open source community at your fingertips to help you along, these templates can be easily accessed and implemented into your CMS. Most include built-in options for customization (like a choice between three pre-set colour palettes) but they're typically limited to the elements specifically included in the theme. Anything beyond what is available in the template will have to be added by you, using code.
A common pitfall of using an open-source theme is that they are free for anyone to use, and this can lead to your site looking nearly identical to another site using the same theme.
Proprietary CMS are designed exactly to meet your branding guidelines and corporate tone. In WebCanada's case, our in-house agency Front60 will research your competitors' websites and your marketing objectives, and then create a design that is optimized to best meet your target market. You'll be part of the process, guiding the design in the direction that best suits your corporate strategy.
With a customized platform you can build brand identity through your website(s) and make sure that consistency and continuity is preserved without giving up the benefit of easily managing and updating the content and message of your website. We are able to demonstrate this every day by offering our large corporate clients like Starwood Hotels a platform that allows their local hotel properties to build out truly individualized websites with a consistent, brand approved look and feel.
Take a look at two of our Westin websites, both built on the same Live CMS custom platform with very distinct creative yet they present common brand standards:
Again, the choice is yours, and depends greatly on your level of back-end programming expertise, your business requirements and available time investment. We're not impartial - we invite you to learn more about our custom solutions!
Check back next week for another installment of Choosing a CMS, or add us to your RSS feed so you don't miss a beat.
Read up on the previous entries in the series here.
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