When choosing a web platform, why stop at a CMS?
These days, clients who demand the simple ability to add and remove content from web platforms with ease are faced with an abundance of choice. The digital technology market is brimming with incredibly advanced tools and hundreds of content management systems, Kentico being one example. So, how do you choose a platform?
At Matter Of Form we pride ourselves on being platform and technology agnostic - always choosing the right tool for the job. Here’s what we think of some popular web platforms.
Wordpress is one of the most popular open source content management systems around. It is a cost-effective, flexible and powerful way to create a site.
When built properly with a bespoke theme (on top of a base like roots.io and using the Advanced Custom Fields Pro plugin), sites can be flexed to meet most content and design needs. With a vibrant and mostly free plugin ecosystem, you can find a solution to almost any requirement.
But with this flexibility comes responsibility; it’s very easy for a site to be thrown together with a poor theme. Excessive use of plugins at best compromises performance and at worst create a security vulnerability.
On the other hand enterprise CMS platforms offer more robust architecture, with powerful tools for publishing workflows and staging content between environments, we have recently developed a number of such client sites on Kentico. As a licensed solution, they are an established company who offer 24/7 support, 7 day bug fix policy and a proactive security test and patching strategy.
But why stop at managing content?
Many systems now seamlessly integrate CMS, eCommerce, online marketing and much more.
Our experience of Kentico is that it can provide a one-stop-solution to client CMS and marketing needs. We are able to manage subscriber lists and marketing campaigns, respond to user interactions through marketing automations and much more.
At a time when understanding your user and serving an appropriate experience is increasingly important, tools that allow us to allocate users to personas and personalise content are becoming increasingly popular.
Other types of content management systems that can store and categorise almost any kind of information are even helping to preserve local communities. An organisation in British Columbia is using a new content services platform from Nuxeo to preserve 34 indigenous languages. The software stores around 400,000 artefacts, including audio files and videos, to record the ancient language. Nuxeo’s open-source and easy-to-use software makes it ideal for everyone in the community to access and contribute to the stored data.
Whichever platform you choose, the ability to select and integrate a whole host of features under one manageable system, including smart search, blogging and messaging, will enable a more focused business strategy and better experience for content editors and marketing teams.
By Chris Wilcox, Chief Technology Officer
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