Many designers and agencies have a preference of the CMS they like to work on, and staff developers and visual designers to help you design your website and add any needed functionality to serve your business within it.
Because agencies and designers have a pre-determined ability to build on one CMS over others, you will find they will push their selected CMS over all others and extol its virtues.
The truth is: not all CMS is created equal and therefore there are advantages and disadvantages to each one of them. But I truly believe it should be your (informed) decision over what is available/easy for your agency to put together.
Most of our clients choose between Squarespace and WordPress. Other CMS we have done work on include Hubspot, DotNetNuke and Joomla.
As we do with all our project, we use the homework process which has been covered here and here on our blog to help inform and determine the CMS options we present to you.
Squarespace is more expensive per month, but allows an easy-to-use interface to make updates, changes and even write and publish blog posts. I suggest Squarespace when clients don’t have on-site help and are not interested in having a developer they can call for changes periodically. Squarespace has excellent documentation, great how-to guides and generally serves the purposes of the small business owner that doesn’t require daily updates to their content. For all the ease of use, however, there is a cost: a lot of the pages are heavily templated, and the plugins and interactions with other platforms are limited but getting slowly better over time.
WordPress is less expensive to run. Requires you to pay for a WordPress optimized hosting on a shared server, and to keep the WordPress platform itself updated in order to keep it secure. A WordPress site that lacks daily, weekly and monthly maintenance can easily fall prey to security breaches, so it is a good idea to pay a trusted developer that can kick the tires around once a month or once a quarter to make sure things are running properly. However, WordPress has an unlimited array of ready-to-use templates as well as fully customizable solutions to develop a site that truly answers to your every business need. The amount of available plugins is mindboggling, and if the site is properly developed any author within your organization should be able to easily upload new content or update existing content without much hassle.
Interested in hearing which CMS is right for you? Let’s chat about your current needs.
