Wakefly BlogChoosing a CMS Platform – The Developers Perspective

Ask a developer which CMS Platform you should use and before they give you an answer they should ask you a lot of questions.

Every business has different needs and every CMS serves different needs.

Each CMS will meet various basic needs with varying levels of difficulty, effort and cost, but chances are there is one CMS that best fits the needs of the business.

For example, if you know you are going to be serving a very large number of visitors per day and use multiple servers to do so, its best to pick a CMS that caters to a farm environment out of the box rather than spending the time and effort wrestling with one that does not scale across servers easily or well.

If you’re thinking about choosing a new CMS, ask your developer the following questions to help narrow down your options.

They will be able to tell you which platform will have the best functionality to help you reach your goals:

• What are the goals you are looking to accomplish with your site? Content only, e-commerce, a little of both?
• For e-commerce – how many products/different SKU’s do you need to support? Are your sales mostly domestic or international?
• Are you new to the market or have an established customer base and brand?
• How big is your business? How much growth do you predict?
• How many daily visitors do you currently support?
• What’s your budget?
• What are you using currently? Do you like it? What don’t you like about it?

We (developers) have our favorite tools including CMS platforms, but just because it’s our favorite does not mean it is the right one for the business. The key is to find a solution that has all the features you need now and later. As your business grows, you will need to add functionality and increase the scale of the platform. You want to make sure whatever you choose now can handle that, so you do not need to switch again in a few years.

A good CMS would offer a (relatively) easy path to upgrade to something more featured rich if you outgrow your current system, and a developer is going to have the best insight as to which these areas we have often done such migrations.

As developers, we also like to try new things and that is one of the perks of the job, whether it is digging into new features in the latest version of a familiar CMS or getting to dabble with a new CMS altogether. The more we know about one CMS the easier and faster we can implement it and know its shortcomings, but the more CMS platforms we know, the more helpful we can be when making decisions on what to implement for any given customer and their unique business needs.

There is no silver bullet when it comes to picking a CMS, it depends on so many factors, size, nature of the business, customer base, etc. If you are finding yourself in need of a CMS, e-commerce or web application and are not sure which to choose, contact us and let us share our wealth of CMS, web technology and digital marketing knowledge to help you navigate this complex landscape.