Which CMS Is Right For the Job?

WordPress seems to be the natural choice when building a web site these days, and with good reason. For the most part. Its ease of use, even for a novice webmaster, makes it easy for a non-technical person to update their website once a web developer has built it for them. And that’s fine for a small business or hobbyist. But for an enterprise-level website, care must be taken to choose the right content management system for the job, now and well into the future. In some cases, the best choice might not be WordPress.

Enterprise-Level Web Development Solutions

I can practically hear you all gasping in horror from way over here. A web developer who is not 100% on board with WordPress? Well, not true. We love WordPress. We’ve been working with it since March 2004 — over 14 years! It is easy to design for, easy to code for, and certainly easy for our clients to use. But is it always going to be the answer to the question of what CMS is best for the project? No. Not always. It can do a lot, but sometimes that comes at the expense of using a slew of plugins, some of which do not always play nice with one another. Enterprise-level projects require enterprise-level content management solutions. And those would include systems such as Expression Engine, Typo3, and Drupal, among others.

WordPress Is NOT Always the Answer

We don’t automatically assume that WordPress is going to be the solution that you need. We will consult with you and find out what your needs are for the web site, and what other issues you want to solve with an online presence. Depending on the features you require now and in the foreseeable future, we’ll then carefully evaluate all possible CMS solutions to arrive at the one best suited to your individual needs. We’ll then tailor that solution to you so that you don’t have a cookie cutter site, but have a site that is yours, and functions just exactly as you need it to. No matter the platform, we will offer you and your staff and stakeholders plenty of training on how to create and manage your content. If you would prefer that we handle content creation and editing, we can certainly do that for you once the site is built.

Keep It Simple, Sherlock

An underlying theme to the way we live our lives here at Pixelita Designs is this:

Flexibility is the key to happiness.

And flexibility when choosing the best CMS for the job also garners happier clients with less frustration and buyer’s remorse.

Joni

Joni Mueller has been designing web sites for hire since 2003, when she first blew up her web host’s server by insisting on running Greymatter. Since then, Joni has designed for Blogger and Movable Type, TextPattern, WordPress and CMS Made Simple. She lives with her cat and shoe collection in a bucolic old section of Houston called Idylwood. For some strange reason, Joni likes to refer to herself in the third person. When she’s not working on web design, she’s ordering lawyers around. And blogging about it. Or both.

www.jonimueller.com