The Backbone of Your Website: How to Choose a CMS for Your Industrial Sector Website
A hot topic of recent years has been how important the spine, or backbone, is in one’s overall health. The same is true for your website’s CMS. The CMS, or content management system, is the backbone of your website in the sense that the CMS dictates how you interact with the backend of your industrial sector website. If you have a CMS that is clunky and difficult to use, you’re likely to disengage from it over time. If you have a CMS that is intuitive and user-friendly, it’s a different story. Of course, those aren’t the only options when choosing a CMS for your industrial sector website. We’ll walk you through how to choose a CMS for your industrial sector website based on a host of factors unique to you and your company.
The Backbone of Your Website: How to Choose a CMS for Your Industrial Sector Website
Here at RedMoxy, we update our website with a new redesign about once every two years. For you in the industrial sector industry, the company’s website is likely updated much less frequently than that. That many redesigns is unnecessary for your industry. What this means, however, is that any website redesign you undertake is a laborious process – one that isn’t undertaken lightly. With that in mind, the importance of choosing a CMS that is well-suited to your company becomes more acute.
Custom or Open Source
The first major decision to make: should your industrial sector company have a custom CMS? Or, should it utilize an open source option like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal? The answer comes down how much flexibility you’d like in your CMS and how much money you’d like to spend on one.
Just as the word implies, a custom CMS gives you a custom solution. Unlike other CMS options, this custom CMS will contain exactly what you need, with no unnecessary “fluff” or extras. But all that customization comes with a cost – the cost to build out and develop a unique CMS just for you.
On the other hand, an open source is “free.” The platform is free to use, but there are costs involved to make it useful to your company. Usually, these extras take the form of plugins or modules that add functionality that the CMS is missing on first install. Some plugins/modules are free, and others are “premium” and come with a cost.
The verdict? Unless you need a truly custom solution, an open source CMS will work just fine. Many huge companies are on open source CMS platforms, and yours can be the next. There’s many, many options out there, so it really just comes down to finding the right option for your industrial sector company.
How involved would you like to be?
Do you plan to make many updates to your site on your own after the launch? Or do you plan to leave it alone, not touching it until the next website redesign? These answers will dictate the CMS you should choose as well. The more control you’d like, the more user-friendly the backend should be. Otherwise, the CMS could contain all HTML and CSS and it wouldn’t matter – you won’t be going back there anyway. Think about the relationship you’d like to have with your website after the launch, and then be up-front with your website designer/developer about what you’re looking for.
RedMoxy’s two cents
We put nearly all of our clients on an open source CMS called WordPress. In our experience, it offers the right amount of support, customization and intuitiveness to make sense for many companies. Someone without a lot of HTML knowledge (like me!) can log in to post blogs, update content and swap out imagery, but web developers can still work within the WordPress constrains to produce a custom, modern website. Plus, with so many other website on WordPress, there’s a large number of support forums out there: useful for those times when things go awry.
If you’d like to talk with us about WordPress and the other CMS options you may want to consider, give us a call at 262-363-4238 or reach out to us at [email protected].