Content Management System CMS – The basis of every website

A CMS (Content Management System) is the basis of every modern website, and a website is the basis of every company.

It is therefore important to make the right choice!

The central question is: What do you want to achieve with the website?

A distinction must be made between different cases. The three cases listed have direct implications for the choice of CMS and hosting, i.e. the place where the website lives.

I work exclusively with open source CMS. The 3 variants have their special area of application and are my favorites.

Website for marketing purposes or to create communities

For websites that are purely for marketing purposes, i.e. where a product or service is advertised, there is really only one sensible choice for the CMS and that is WordPress!

Hosting a WordPress website for marketing purposes should therefore support marketing trends and effectiveness. A top hosting product that I recommend is the Digital Business Lounge, which has been specially developed and optimized for marketing purposes.

Content is becoming increasingly important online. It is therefore important to be able to capture this as efficiently as possible on a website. Once the basic structure of the CMS has been set up, it should be possible to implement the expansion with additional content as quickly as possible. It should not only be possible for a single employee of a company to manage the website, but several should be able to work on it at the same time. They should be able to write and record beautifully designed and high-quality articles with the least possible technical knowledge so that they can be published on various channels.

WordPress is very popular among people who are actively involved in marketing. Therefore, the latest trends are promptly implemented in extensions (plugins), and these can be easily integrated into the system. This is essential in today’s rapidly changing world!

If developers first have to be hired to write extensions for your website in response to a new marketing trend, you lose time and the costs are high.

Modern funnel technology is becoming increasingly popular in online marketing. This requires landing pages and sales pages in addition to the classic website (called the authority site). They are usually implemented in separate systems, as their requirements differ from those of the authority website.

Avoid deviating too much from what users are used to on the Internet. Standards have become established that visitors can deal with. If they first have to learn how to use your website, you will unnecessarily lose many potential customers.

Templates are used to control the appearance and functionality of the website in WordPress. A large number of ready-made templates are available, which also come with their own special set of extensions. It only makes sense to develop such templates yourself if you have to adapt the design of the website to a rigid CI/CD (corporate identity/corporate design). If this is the case, I advise you to reconsider this whenever possible and adapt it to the possibilities on the web. Normally, you make life unnecessarily difficult for yourself with special fonts and designs and incur costs.

Website with large volumes of hits (advanced case)

If, for example, websites serve large events and have to cope with 100,000 or more hits from all over the world at peak moments, normal hosting infrastructures are no longer suitable. Even WordPress may then no longer be an option.

If such websites are involved, it is very likely that only the large cloud providers Amazon AWS and Google Cloud will be considered for hosting. They provide distributed server farms worldwide where the load, i.e. the access volume, can be distributed dynamically. It is charged according to the cost structures of the two tech giants on the basis of access and access volume.

For websites that have to deal with such peaks in traffic, it is particularly important to pay attention to the optimization options. The more dynamically components can be integrated into a CMS or removed, the better. This requires practical load tests in a preliminary test. Above all, tests should be carried out with a much higher load than that which must be assumed in reality.

I suggest Drupal (based on PHP and extendable with Symfony) or Django (based on Python) for such a website. But there are also CMS systems based on .Net. In my opinion, it is relevant in such a case to exclude everything that is superfluous or to encapsulate it in such a way that micro services are only loaded when necessary. This applies to both the backend and the frontend (today mostly written in Angular or React).

The following considerations should be included in an evaluation:

– Are developers for the initial development and the extension available on the market and what is their price?

– Is the CMS being actively developed and can it keep up with competing products?

– Is the CMS well documented, or is there an active developer community?

– Are there possibilities for support from a manufacturer, even if the CMS is open source?

Website as online store

There are various options for web stores and eCommerce, depending on the size and objective.

Here is a comparison of 15 leading platforms.

Big Commerce

For a new, larger online store operated by a retailer in Switzerland, I suggest BigCommerce first. BigCommerce covers all classic cases of products.

WooCommerce

When it comes to selling clearly defined products, a clean and easy-to-maintain store can be set up with WooCommerce on the basis of WordPress. Like the WordPress website itself, the hosting can be built on the hosting of your choice. In this case, I also use the Digital Business Lounge, which has been specially developed and optimized for marketing purposes.

Drupal Commerce

If Drupal 8 is used for the website, the Drupal Commerce module can be used, to which all necessary eCommerce components can be added as modules on the basis of Drupal.

WooCommerce, Drupal Commerce and BigCommerce offer the possibilities for selling both digital and physical products.

Shopify

Another interesting solution is Shopify. Shopify is a webshop builder, i.e. a system that you host at Shopify.com. This store solution is prefabricated and ready for operation.

The product is licensed as a subscription. This solution is particularly interesting for operators of stores selling physical products outside Switzerland, as it allows retailers to store products directly on Amazon and have them delivered to the customer via Amazon FBA.

What does a CMS do?

A modern CMS gives you the opportunity to publish content on the web. It organizes them according to the requirements of search engines and social media!

Visitors should be able to find their way around your website. You should be able to direct these visitors to the right content.

A CMS is an application that, simply put, has the task of making the content of a website easy to edit and displaying it beautifully on the web. The aim is also to ensure that the content can be easily found by people searching for your content via search engines. In modern CMS you have the possibility to create articles almost like in Microsoft Word, only with the difference that these can then be published on the web.

A CMS is not the same as a website builder, e.g. Wix, Shopify or Jimdoo. With such solutions, only the most important functions are activated and you are limited accordingly. In addition, you do not have full control over the website and pay a subscription fee to use it. For companies, this is only recommended in special cases.

My favorites

WordPress

WordPress is the favorite in many cases. There are good reasons for choosing a different platform.

WordPress has grown as a blog system, which is primarily about writing and publishing articles.

Developers claim that they can do anything with WordPress. However, I am rather skeptical when it comes to abusing the system.

WordPress is not designed for structuring data. There is no clear form of how data can be cleanly separated and stored in its own fields.

The number of ready-made themes for the presentation is huge. Unless there are good reasons, one of these themes should be selected and used as a basis.

Of course, you can also develop your own themes and plugins.

Major adjustments to existing themes are rather laborious and can be very time-consuming, with an uncertain outcome.

Drupal 8

Drupal has been running flawlessly for me for 4 years and updates are extremely easy and very stable via the terminal. Once set up, it is a reliable companion.

The Drupal CMS is based on PHP and the PHP framework Symfony.

What I appreciate about the development is the great flexibility and that everything is very structured. This has been further optimized in version 8 in contrast to version 7. The introduction of version 8 took a relatively long time because the system was almost completely overhauled in order to be ready for the future.

What speaks in favor of using Drupal is that version 8 consistently uses the Symfony Framework as a basis for expansion with PHP in-house developments. This means that there are no limits to expansion.

Drupal is to be understood as a backend for a larger web solution, which also allows special requirements for the frontend without any problems. This means that nothing stands in the way of the use of technologies such as Angular or React. Various interfaces to other systems can also be built. These can be ERP systems or special media libraries, for example.

What speaks against its use is that the developer community is not very large, especially in Switzerland, and developers are expensive.

Django

Django is actually a framework based on the Python programming language, but also offers the possibility of setting up a very stable and versatile CMS.

Python is becoming increasingly important as a programming language and the developer community is growing steadily. This is very relevant in the environment of professional and specialized web solutions. Developers, like other employees, are under pressure not to get bogged down with old technologies. Accordingly, the best will adapt to the trend.

This should be analyzed very carefully during the selection process when it comes to commissioning a larger system.

In my opinion, Django is the alternative to Drupal 8. Just like Drupal, it opens up the possibility of supplying complex front-end solutions as a back-end, as well as providing interfaces to other systems.

The developer community is large. The prices of developers are usually lower than those for Drupal developers.

Conclusion

WordPress is the right choice for most websites. The fewer special requirements are specified, the better the website performs and the faster it is developed. The focus should be on ensuring that the website meets current marketing trends. For example, pop-ups for newsletter subscriptions and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) should be integrated. At the same time, the focus should be on creating landing pages and sales pages separately and using email automation.

The basic system for large web solutions must be evaluated in detail. I am happy to support you in the evaluation as well as in the implementation of the proposed systems.