From Louisville to Boston to Los Angeles to Chicago, the most important questions that folks considering embarking upon an ecommerce website design venture should ask, but rarely do, is "Will you build my website in a CMS?" and "Which CMS will you use and why?"
CMS is an acronym for Content Management System that refers to the platform the web developer is planning to use when he or she builds your new website and it is of vital importance to the success or failure of your web project.
This begs the question, "What is a platform?" A platform, or environment, is a program that has been built that will enable a web developer to create a website that will allow users to add and edit content without having to know anything about programming. A CMS platform uses an interface that is very similar to traditional word processing programs to make it simple for anyone who can type to make substantial changes to a website and then upload those changes to the Internet in real time. So when a web designer suggests a CMS, that's what he or she is describing.
If you are fielding proposals from website design firms and you ask those questions, you'll be amazed at the responses you'll get! Most of the time, the developer will answer in the affirmative, but there are some additional options he or she can offer at this point, including a fully custom solution. Full custom solutions are pricey. They are written in line by line code and they can ultimately be excellent, but the price you're going to pay for a custom solution can be quite shocking. But if you are a small to medium size business, there aren't many developers who would recommend a custom solution because of the cost - and time - you'll have to invest.
In a related issue - a developer might recommend a custom solution he has already developed, where are you have to do is provide new artwork and new content and he or she can create your website with a relatively lower cost and many people eagerly choose that option. The downside of this scenario is that these are proprietary programs and that means the web company that developed the prototype owns it and they are allowing you to use it for a fee. Essentially, you may pay for the website but the web company is the actual owner and you better like those people a lot because you're stuck with them until the cows come home. There are more options available for you and the developer who's calling on you and I'll get into some of them in future entries, but for now, let's assume we're going with a CMS.
A CMS can save an end user a lot of money now that the days of simple brochure sites are behind us. Website owners are expecting a lot more out of their websites now than they used to expect and with all the amazing new tools that are available these days, those expectations can be met at a much lower price tag than they used to have. The typical website today - basic site without ecommerce - can be built for just a few thousand dollars and that includes a nice, custom design, a blog, as many pages as you like and a largely spam-proof email contact form and the end users can edit 90-95% of the content. Ecommerce websites cost more but the pre-structured environment offered by a CMS makes them much more affordable than they were just a few years ago.
The programming language used by a CMS can be ASP.NET, PERL, Javascript or PHP. The databases that make them work can be MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Microsoft SQL Server. Some of the more popular CMS include Wordpress, Joomla, Lyceum, Mambo, Sharepoint, Expression Engine and our preferred CMS - Drupal.
There are a ton of reasons why we prefer Drupal over all other Content Management Systems, but our #1 criteria for any CMS that we consider using is that it be Open Source. More soon!
