5 Steps to Choose the Correct Content Management System (CMS)

How to look for the correct content management system (CMS) for you?

To ensure successful implementation and adoption, the content management system (CMS) solution must be implemented like any other large enterprise application, with clear objectives and systematic planning mechanisms. So let’s look at some best practices that should be on everyone’s checklist before deploying any CMS within your organization.

Step 1: Evaluate Your Content Information

Rather than looking only at the type of the the CMS platform, you should look at how processes, business rules, and the content are defined. The free ASP CMS or other ASP CMS purchased should also easily integrate with multiple systems that affect this landscape as well as are necessary to help meet your defined business goals – such as your company / business content management process or even building a customer relationship management system. It is advisable not to buy a CMS without any plan to it as this will waste your time and resources.

Step 2: Choose the tight CMS for Your Business Needs

This can be evaluated by following these few points:
1 – Speed of installation and deployment
There is a direct correlation between CMS implementation/configuration time and costs incurred. Avoid using the CMS that requires excessive programming coding efforts. Hence, a user friendly CMS will only be effective if it can be easily install, configured and deployed to the hosting server, and even can be used by non- IT professionals.

2 – Ease of users and administration process
Like any other business application, the success of a CMS depends on adoption by the end user community. A user friendly content management system will be able to manage by all users with within the easy to use graphical interface. As for the IT professional / webmasters, they are also expecting seamless effort to integrate multiple company websites using a single console, and integrate the CMS effortlessly into the organization’s IT landscape. Eventually, a great CMS can meet different users roles and demands.

Step 3:Make sure the CMS involves all users in the company

As we know, the purpose of using the CMS is to able to create a easy to use portal for every person involved in the company / business. Hence, they are all leveraged to build and customize the system. Involving non-technical SMEs in the design of the new CMS will also help minimize reluctance to use the system.

Step 4: Now we talk about the maintenance aspects of CMS

On top of ongoing support and management, you also need basic application and infrastructure support of the installed software. This requires the efforts of a dedicated team, responsible for managing hardware, software, and the network.
Change is a must with most Web sites and your CMS needs to be as flexible as your organization, whether this is a simple template change or an entire site redesign. You need to factor in and expect that you will need to have some level of service be it from your internal IT department.

Final Step: Plan ahead for more in the future

You must make sure that the chosen CMS has the technological bandwidth and capability to quickly capitalize on emerging communication media. It is also related to the hosting plan you choose to host your content management system, make sure it will be able to upgrade or add on extra features to handle to growing size of your CMS, it will be a great advantage if the hosting companies provide support for any issue arise in the long run.

Suggested CMS system and Hosting Provider

ASP.NET CMS
1 – DotNetNuke - Compare DotNetNuke hosting plan here.
2 – Kentico CMS – Compare Kentico CMS hosting plan here.
3 – Sitefinity CMS – Compare Sitefinity hosting plan here.
4 – mojoPortal - Compare mojoPortal hosting plan here.
5 – Umbraco - Compare Umbraco hosting plan here.

Php CMS
1 – Drupal - Compare Drupal hosting plan here.
2 – Joomla - Compare Joomla hosting plan here.
3 – Mambo - Compare Mambo hosting plan here.
4 – Exponent - Compare Exponent hosting plan here.
5 – Nucleus CMS – Compare Nucleus hosting plan here.
6 – Xoops - Compare Xoops hosting plan here.