A Content Management System (CMS) provides a powerful foundation upon which to build your website, but there are a lot of options out there, at various price levels and requiring different levels of investment in hardware and maintenance. It can be tricky to determine which one will work best for you, and that’s where Diagram comes in. As a web development company, we don’t work with just one CMS platform; we partner with several providers and research our clients’ needs to help them find the best, most cost-effective solution. Whether that might be Ektron, EPiServer, Wordpress, or a custom CMS solution, we can help you determine the ideal CMS for your site.
A CMS for Your Business Goals
We know that each of our clients has a different set of requirements for their website, and we ensure that you’re going to get the best solution for your needs. We won’t recommend an enterprise CMS platform with a large number of capabilities if you’re only going to be using 10% of those features. We want you to be able to initially utilize at least 50-75% of what a CMS has to offer, leaving room for growth and expansion as your business needs change and expand in the future.
We work to understand our clients’ business models, looking at their current plans as well as what they expect to accomplish within the next few years. Doing so allows us to tailor our recommendations to what you need. A CMS can offer many capabilities, including:
- Ecommerce
- Personalization
- Taxonomy (one-to-many categorization)
- Targeted content
- Inbound lead automation
- Tie-ins with CRMs and AMSs
- Reporting
- Workflow
- Permissions
- Persona management
- Social media integration
- Search engine optimization
- Community features like forums and groups
- Multi-tier environments (including synchronization and disaster recovery/high availability solutions).
We do the research to learn exactly what requirements you need, and match those requirements with the CMS platform that will be able to meet them immediately and exceed them over the next few years.
A CMS for Your Skills
In addition, we want to make sure your internal developers or content editors are going to be comfortable using the selected CMS, so we take their technical ability and experience into account when recommending a CMS. If your development staff has experience working with .Net, they might be more comfortable with Ektron or EPiServer. On the other hand, someone with a background in PHP may be better suited for Wordpress. The ability level of content editors needs to be taken into account as well; a platform like Wordpress is easy to use, but it does require some knowledge of HTML and CSS for using when inserting feature snippets. While this might make sense for some, it’s not going to be the best choice for everyone. We want to make sure we align the CMS platform with the technical skillset of the staff members who are going to be using it.
An Up-To-Date CMS
At Diagram, we regularly review the available technologies and keep up with developments in the various platforms, making sure that they remain suitable for the clients who are using them. After defining the requirements for the site, we will work with the CMS manufacturer to acquire the software for our clients and implement it for their site. We are always available to answer any questions, whether they pertain to how to use the site’s current capabilities or what’s possible to add in the future.
As developers who work primarily with CMS-driven websites, we know what the various platforms have to offer, how much they will cost to implement, what technical requirements they have, and how to get the most out of them, and we will work with you to deliver the best possible experience for your investment.
Do you have any questions about why you should choose a CMS or how to implement a CMS for your website? Do you want to know what features the different platforms offer and how much they will cost? Please contact us for more information, and one of our solution engineers will work with you to get you the answers you need.
