A New Website: Which CMS Best Suits Your Requirements?

If you’re looking for a new website for your company, a key consideration will be the Content Management System (CMS). A new website is a big investment - it is the core of your digital presence and is likely to have a significant impact on lead generation and sales. Therefore, choosing a CMS that will fulfil all your requirements is a critical decision. Hopefully, this article will give you an insight into some of the most popular CMS platforms. However, before we delve into the crux of the article, let’s first set some context….

A CMS is an application that allows marketers, digital marketers and content editors to manage the inception of pages within the website, without having to approach an agency for simple text and image changes. CMS platforms typically have user management, SEO tools, scheduled publishing, and lots of other useful features.

The truth is, and this may not be particularly helpful, but there isn’t one single “best” CMS, however, there is likely to be a CMS that best suits your needs. That is, different CMS platforms are suitable for different businesses and marketing teams. Whilst one CMS may suit company A, it may not be entirely the right solution for company B.

There are multiple factors to consider when deciding on the most suitable CMS including: -

• Functional requirements - do you need to integrate with pre-existing systems? Do you require e-commerce functionality to sell products? Will users need to sign into a portal area to access their account?
• Marketing requirements - SEO performance - how important is ranking on search engines to your business? Analytical tools - will you want to monitor the impact of any content changes on user behaviour, and to what degree? Do you want to deliver a personalised website experience by displaying content tailored to a user’s behaviour?
• Content requirements - how much flexibility do you want when adding new content and creating new landing pages? How frequently will you add new content, and how easy and efficient do you want the process to be?
• Design requirements - are you looking for a completely custom design for your new website so that you stand out amongst your competitors?

Umbraco and Sitecore are two of our favourite Content Management Systems which are suited to companies looking for a custom solution with more advanced capabilities. Both platforms are built on Microsoft’s .Net framework meaning that pretty much anything is possible from a functional and integration perspective.

Sitecore yields more advanced analytics and marketing automation out of the box, whilst Umbraco is arguably a more user-friendly platform lending itself to a smoother content editing experience.