Website CMS ???

[shaun adams]

Doing a little research on which way I want my website to go at the minute.

If I am having a CMS in the site is it a bad idea to have a website made with a web designers own rather than word press or similar.

[iamlijo]

It depends on the purpose of the website . You can either build a website full on CMS like wordpress else you can make a static home page and a blog with similar design for updation and news. Blogs are always preferred as beacuse of the web2.0 (commenting ,rss ..) advantages.

regards

[scothost]

Depends on what you need from the CMS, apart from Wordpress there are very good CMS's out there such as Joomla and others. There is nothing wrong with using these if it fits your requirements and you can get a designer to create your image in the form of a bespoke theme for it.

[shaun adams]

Which CMS is best for SEO and blogs, I also want a link for twitter.

[scothost]

Wordpress is both good for this and easy to use, but limited in its presentation ability unless you know what your doing.

Joomla is a more rounded but complex CMS.

[shaun adams]

Will there own brand CMS not be as good for SEO ???

Also is it a good idea to have Twitter and would my website gain any link juice by having it on my site (Would it be an inbound or outbound link).

[Ali-v-8]

cms systems have absolutely nothing to do with SEO
cms = content management system.
seo requires google to read the content.

[Ali-v-8]

by the way i hate joomla worse system ever invented (imo)
cant stand it
its horrible
euuuughhh

and its dynamic

[shaun adams]

what about Twitter does that help as I see people have that and also is there a diffrence between a wordpress and RSS feed.

[fisicx]

Shaun STOP!

You are all over the place with no real idea about where your business is going to go. Twitter, RSS, blogging and that other stuff is irrelevant. They can only support your business not become the business.

Decide what it is you want to acheive then build your business plan, do the finacial projections to test for viability and then decide on the best method of acheving your aims.

Faffing around worrying about the best CMS is pointless at this stage.

[shaun adams]

The problem is not CMS it is SEO no point building a great tajmahal in the middle of a field with no customers seeing it.

I just have questions which so far have helped me to determine where I am going, there will be other questions but that's life.

I like to know most things myself before I commit to a new concept rather than be blind and not ask or get the right things.

I was almost burnt a month ago as I knew very little about websites and nearly commit on a big project that could have killed my business straight away, thankfully I remembered this forum and have learnt a lot in the last week.

Thanks for you comments and hopefully you can add some insight as you are a web builder.

Thanks Shaun

[fisicx]

Planning is the key to everything.

Decide on your aims, research your potential custoimers, their buying habits, how they use the internet, their disposalbe income and so on. Think about your marketing plan, budget, finacial projections and escape plan.

It's only when you have a viable busienss plan that you need to consider the scope of the website. You will discover that most products have their limitations, one CMS will have 90% of the features you want but another will have the reamining 10% but fail in some crtical area. you could go bespoke but that may tie you to a specific developer and hosting package.

You may consider running a test site with PPC to determine if the idea is viable. You might just go with a very simple site, just an offer and means to get the product.

It's the business plan that will indicate the type of site your need. RSS, twitter, blogging, affilites are just the icing on the cake, almost addons you can play with once the main site is up and running. Remember as well that internet usage is constantly changing, squidoo was the answwer to everything a while back, now it's local search that seems to be popular, tomorrow it may be mobile computing that gets the thumbs up. You need to have a flexible approach to your website, be realdt to constantly experiment and test to see what works and what doesn't. Twitter might be a a good marketing tool for you but it should be part of your plan not the core. Same with RSS or article writing, they are just tools you use as part of you marketing strategy ready to be discarded when they fall from grace.

[narbundi]

Your website needs to encapsulate how you want to present your business on the internet. So first rule is to be very clear about your business model and what core message you want to communicate.

Then you need to decide how much time you (or your staff) are going to spend online both updating your website and engaging with social media in general (ie Twitter, Facebook etc) Also do you need an e-commerce site with shoppng cart and any other functions ie contact us form etc

Having your Twitter feed is, in my opinion, a good idea as it allows visitors to follow you if they so wish, thus building up your network. But only do this if you are going to post interesting and relevant tweets regularly.

As has already been said the content management system has nothing to do with SEO - the search engines list your site depending on how it has been structured, what keywords you use, keyword density and other factors such as how well it has been indexed etc.

All our sites are in Wordpress and from my experience this is the CMS that most people find easy to operate.

My best advice is to focus on your business and find a web developer that you feel comfortable with to help you build your online presence effectively. A well designed site that represents your business positively should pay for itself and be one of the best investments you can make.

If you need any more help get in touch

Louisa

[F1SEO]

Wordpress is good for small sites imo.

But in my experience it doesn't scale that well, once you start adding some plugins in there it's like adding a go-slow button to it. Over about 100 pages I would use a heavy-duty CMS, something like MODx or Drupal.

All three WP, MODx and Drupal are great for SEO. WP has a slight edge mainy because it has the most powerful blog built in. If you take that out .. then MODx and Drupal become the best for the sheer power and scalability. MODx flies whatever you throw at it .. it's a very efficient CMS.

Joomla I would tend to avoid because it's full of security holes. WP is also not that secure and regular patches are issued. This is one thing you notice, serious CMS have an update once every 4-6 months .. WP has about one every few weeks.

To answer your question though, WP is great for smaller CMS and blog as long as you remember to update the core software quite often.