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Many of my friends like to celebrate the flashpoint for the French Revolution, the storming of the Bastille in 1789, by popping a bottle of Chateau Lafite and watching the Tour de France. I myself pass on the expensive French wine, but do appreciate the power and stamina of riders who take on the mountain stages, time trials and altitude finishes that make up the Tour’s itinerary. Striving for excellence is inspirational, if it’s climbing l’Alpe d’Huez, at 6,069 feet, meeting the pressing deadlines at the end of a quarter, or pushing forward your web infrastructure implementation. This month I want to help you understand the benefits and pitfalls attendant to choosing a content management system (CMS). Our last newsletter focused on enterprise CMS and large-scale globalization initiatives. Learn more about Open Source CMS in this month’s newsletter!
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Content management systems offer a framework to facilitate the ongoing maintenance and development of a website. We are often asked to help our clients evaluate from among the hundreds of available CMS solutions available on the market. Given the vast selection and wide variety of features and costs, clients often consider Open Source solutions. Below I briefly contrast the advantages and disadvantages of choosing a commercial and open source CMS.
Open Source CMS are well suited for:
- Smaller websites
- Dynamic Content Delivery
- Few content contributors
- Lower performance requirements
Why an Open Source CMS may not be ideal:
- Inability to scale and performance limitations
- Significant cost of customization
- Lack of workflows for globalization
- Unreliable upgrade path (numerous software updates often break functionality)
Benefits of commercial CMS:
- Superior performance with capacity to support high traffic levels
- Scalability
- Personalized database driven content
- Robust workflows and API’s that hook into translation vendors
- Capacity to support global web platform with multiple localized websites
- Reliable upgrade path
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Best Practices: AtreNet PHP Libraries
When early stage companies approach us, we sometimes suggest they delay the adoption of a CMS. We have deployed and developed many Open Source and commercial CMS applications over the years. Unfortunately, sometimes companies bind themselves to a restrictive, low performance CMS, that is discarded a year later when performance and scalability become critical. A CMS can also drastically increase the costs of a significant website refresh. In some circumstances we recommend clients instead rely on AtreNet PHP libraries. This approach separates content from the graphical presentation of the website while simplifying content administration. It also is much less expensive to perform a site-wide redesign without restrictive structure of a CMS.
Watch Video: How to Evaluate a CMS
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Happy Bastille Day,
Tushar Atre |
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When Exigen Group needed a partner to develop their new corporate website and implement a cost-effective CMS solution they turned to AtreNet. See a video of what Lonnie Sue Sutton, Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at Exigen has to say about AtreNet.
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AtreNet’s new VP of Client Services, Tad Shelby, hosts a monthly salon on using Google Analytics. Take an afternoon to join us at our Santa Cruz Harbor offices to learn how to see your website through this powerful tool.
When: Last Friday of Every Month
Where: AtreNet, Santa Cruz Harbor, 2122 East Cliff Dr, Santa Cruz, CA
How to register: Send an email to gas-rsvp@atre.net or call 831 464 0100
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