Business Website Advice

I use - and highly recommend - WordPress CMS (Content Management Software) for my Sticky Websites blog-website that you are reading. Joomla and Drupal are other popular CMS options. Understand their features and target users and you’ll make a good decision on which is best for you.

From the start I say, I’m not a website designer, I’m a website owner-writer- business owner.  Which software you use for your website depends hugely on which role you are in - designer or user.  All three CMS can do the job but which is best for you.

WordPress is king-pin.  (oooh that’ll get me in trouble with some readers).  I consider WordPress hard to beat for usability by not-too-techie-types, stability and wide choice of plugins that give your site added functionality.  The number, types and quality of plugins is important. Plugin? In computer-speak a plugin can also be called addin, addon, snapin to do little things on your website like a calendar, subscription, show tweets or Facebook, maps etc etc - get the gist?  

Here’s an overview of Joomla Drupal and WordPress CMS. Since I’m not a designer-type who works with one or all,  I started to research them and came across a succinct post by Jamie Cameron who wrote an overview of the three - WordPress Joomla and Drupal.  Jamie is far less biased than I.  My take is it boils down to how much of a techie is the person setting up the site. 

I marvel over the WordPress sites built by my web designer Jo Couchman from Creative Web Ideas. She’s a recognised NZ WordPress guru.  She gets the site functioning fully customised for the user to takeover and add the meat. (I am way overdue for an upgrade but moving house has got in the way. Watch this space.)

From my limited experience with business owners using Joomla or Drupal built websites not all systems are equal.  They are similar in ease of writing plains posts but not so for doing SEO work (especially after the fact) or some other basic functions like adding pages and widgets. Also I found that some dashboards are too easy to muck up the looks of the site and too hard to add and align images.

The whole point of using CMS is to have a website self-managed in-house by people with basic word processing skills not designers/developers.

I look forward to hearing your experiences with the various CMS.

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