If you want to operate a company website and are not a professional web developer by chance, you can hardly avoid a CMS ( Content Management System) today. If several users are involved in page maintenance, and the content constantly changes, a suitable content management system is even indispensable. This article introduces four of the most used CMS and gives an overview of the respective systems’ strengths, weaknesses, and unique features.
Table of Contents
An Explanation of Terms In Advance
Content management systems (CMS) were developed to organize and distribute content. They contain a website’s content separately from the presentation of the published information. Unique content is saved in a commonly used format and allows the site or blog administrators to access and edit it using familiar tools. A content management system typically consists of a frontend and a backend area. The backend area serves as the actual administration area, where the creation and maintenance of the website take place. The front end is the existing website as displayed to the user in the browser. A content management system enables the basic web programming, layout and content to be separated. The provider often provides the user with ready-made designs, color specifications and paragraph formats. In this way, inexperienced users can easily customize websites without programming knowledge, and content can be collected more easily.
The Agony of Choice
Given many systems on the market, anyone who wants to find the right content management system for their own company must first clarify what their requirements are. Possible questions here could be:
- What goal are you pursuing with your website?
- Are you looking for multi location web design for a local business or franchise?
- What content should be offered?
- How many people are involved in administration?
- Do you want to manage multiple websites at the same time?
- How clear and user-friendly is the system?
- Are extensions and plug-ins required?
- headless vs coupled vs decoupled cms: Which is best?
- What about search engine optimization?
Here are four popular content management systems presented briefly and concisely because the primary aim is to show the different focal points and possible uses of the systems.
WordPress
What started as simple blog management software is now the world’s most widely used CMS. With WordPress, even complex websites, shops, or community platforms can be easily set up. Countless functions, templates and extensions allow maximum customization of your website. However, due to this extreme expandability, the CMS has also become more complex and cumbersome in recent years.
Advantages:
- Fast, easy installation
- A considerable number of partly free designs and templates
- Numerous extensions such as plug-ins and widgets enable additional functions.
- WordPress is generally considered to be very search engine friendly.
- Mobile WordPress apps and publishing tools expand and simplify management.
Disadvantages:
- The management of multi-page, extensive portals is sometimes still cumbersome.
- WordPress can only handle manageable streams of visitors (a few hundred to several thousand visitors per day).
- WordPress is the optimal choice for blogging or news portals and smaller sites from SMEs with a manageable site structure. The existing plug-ins offer additional functionality.
Joomla
Joomla ranks second and has established itself in open-source CMS in recent years. Joomla is easy to learn even without much previous knowledge, and the installation is also considered fast and largely problem-free. The system provides the user with a variety of tools that allow changes to be made without making adjustments to the core of the system.
Advantages:
- Installation and management to handle without specialist knowledge.
- Extremely user-friendly generation of templates
- The sizeable adjacent user community, numerous user guides and tutorials
Disadvantages:
- Complex text formatting is often tricky.
- Rights management and approval processes are somewhat immature.
- Updates must be made manually via extensions, which sometimes requires a lot of work and specialist knowledge.
- Joomla is also suitable for more complex page structures but is not as flexible as other content management systems since only one main content element can be assigned. Joomla is, therefore, suitable for small to large sites insofar as no release workflows and multi-domain installations are provided.
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