What factors exist to choose to develop a website or to use a CMS?

Question

Hello SO Team:

We are in the process of starting a new company website and the question was brought to use or not a Content Management Solution. What will be the factors to consider to be able to debate between this two options.

Both of them have pros/cons, but I am sure that there has to be a few people out there that will have an external point of view to this situation. i will appreciate your opinion.

Thanks.

Answer 1

For a company website, if you write your own, you're probably going to be reinventing a lot of what a CMS already gives you. The content on your site will most likely change frequently, and the company will probably want non-developers to maintain the content. With your own implementation, you'll have to provide management pages for non-devs to upload new content (text, images, docs, etc.), so it might make sense to just look at existing CMS frameworks.

The downside of a CMS is that you might have to work around styling issues to give the site the exact look-and-feel you're going for. Usually a good HTML/CSS developer can style any page in any way you want, so this isn't too big of a concern.

Answer 2

Most CMS's are very extensible. You have a framework to start with, and from there you can add whatever you want. Also since practically all CMS's have modules/components/plugins from their community, you can immediately add to the core with even more features for exactly what you need.

Andy's right, too. You can layer the design on top of the the CMS, and it's very easy to extend the front end even more with all the great JS libraries out there - which will be largely CMS & language agnostic, so if you ever migrate from one CMS to another you can still keep a large portion of that code, too.

In short, modern CMS's are mature, easy to set up, highly extensible and customizeable so ... Don't reinvent the wheel unless you have some very strong, specific, compelling reason to do so.

Answer 3

I think differently. A company website should be unique, personal, I thus I would avoid using a CMS.

Maybe you want a huge enterprise website, in this case a CMS will be better for you, but I'd rather write my simple content management than using a bloated, new hardware dependent website.

Oh, and the users will notice the difference in speed surfing through your hand-written website.

There are 3 points I think are important:

1. Personalization. CMSs can be
   customized, but it's much worse to
   style some pre-made html than styling a pre-styled (since you thought how you'd like it to be) html.
2. Speed.
3. Web Standards - Accessibility - Unobtrusive JavaScript

Answer 4

First lets consider the options:

1. No CMS - No Tools: you have a very good developer with a strong HTML background, some server side expertise and plenty of time on his/her hands.

2. No CMS but a light weight tool: You have a person or two who are comfortable with the basics of HTML, you site is mostly static and it is already built, but you need to update - you can consider any number of tools from (yes it is true) DreamWeaver, Aptana, Visual Studio WebExpres)

3. You have a small to medium web team and you have a medium for large site that is mostly content. I have found this to be the bulk of all projects that I have every seen. May times thes types of engagements end up with a large enterprise system becasue they incorrectly understood the two or three of the main factors that should drive an Enterprise CMS (read costs more that $250 and way more than free). Open source blogging engines like WordPress are very powerful and extensible. Add in a free editorial tool like LiveWriter and you have a lot if distributed editorial power, cheap, and it takes care of lots of things like Standards and SEO because it is just build solidliy in that respect. Plus there are a lot of people who can help you out. And it is very extensible.

4. Enterprise CMS: Three factors should guide your decisions regarding CMS:

   1. Large distributed editorial team that requires rigorous (usually complex) editorial workflows.

   2. The site design and operation has been deemed secondary to some other functioanlity provided byt the CMS (simple SarBox Compliance, easy support for localizing the site to many languages)

   3. In house experience with the product that has been positive and has proven ROI - but be clear, having purchased licenses is no reason to deploy. I have seen far too many cases where a large scale CMS was purchased (licensed) only to find it would not suit the true needs of the project. In some cases the clients were wise and moved on. In others they stuck to their purchase and to this day live in a world of hurt.

Start simple and grow - The average website had a half-life of 3 years. Make a series of small mistakes that you can easily correct through fast itteration. Only go for the big stuff when you are sure.

Instant smell that you are buying more than you need - you can't find out the price of the product until a sales person visits you and you can't get demo bits of the system untl you attend their traning session. By the time you get done with that, you could have an awsome site up and be buying everyone at your firm some nice libations.