Type your company name into Google: where does your company show up in the results? Is it the first result? Is it halfway down the third page?

No matter your business plan or industry, a top result on a search engine can lend your company credibility and prestige. Your customers will treat top results as the best matches available, regardless of whether that is actually the case.

SEO is a gargantuan factor to consider when choosing a CMS platform. After all, you want your site to be number one in results and attract customers, potential employees and investors.

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!

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?

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!