telly grobstein

11 April 2016

Content Management Systems

An extremely popular way of creating websites these days is to use a Content Management System (CMS). Most are very user-friendly and allow people with very little knowledge in web design to create a website. Others are more complex and are usually used for bigger websites than a blog. Here are some examples of CMS's:

Small Content Management Systems

1. Wix.com
   gives you access to hundreds of templates to choose from. After choosing a template, you simply drag and drop the information into the site without needing to edit any code. It's free, and very user friendly. One of the downsides is that, unless you pay, you have a footer at the bottom that says it's made by Wix. It can come off as tacky to see that, which might take away from professionalism.
   
   
2. Wordpress.com
   This is one of the more popular CMS's. It has many modern templates that you can apply to your site that are free, while some you have to pay for. It is generally used for users that do not have much coding knowledge as it is very easy to put together. The downside is that while it is easy to use and very well known, the themes that are free may be overused and easy to spot as a Wordpress site, which can be offputting.



3. Blogger.com
   If you want to create a blog and have limited coding or web design capabilities, Blogger may be perfect for you. It has free templates, and is user-friendly as well. It is much more simplistic in its updating capabilities than others, which makes it easy to pass from one person to another. It has many downsides. It hasn't had a good update in a while, which can make it seem outdated. It has a limited number of themes, making their sites look very similar. Also, moving your site to another server is much more complicated. You will risk losing your SEO, which can affect the amount of people visiting the site.

Larger Content Management Systems

1. Wordpress.org
   Wordpress.org is different from Wordpress.com in that it is a downloadable program with similar features as the online platform. Unlike online, the downloaded CMS allows users to edit the code and personalize their site much more. The downside is that it can be hard to transfer editing capabilities between people that are unfamiliar.



2. Drupal.org
   Drupal is a large CMS that has become widely popular. They are similar to Wordpress in that it is a CMS that you download. They offer many features for large-scale websites, such as forums, user blogs, OpenID, and more. One of their most popular features is the taxonomy feature. This allows users to categorize their content. They also host a large number of content types, such videos, polls, podcasts, and statistics. The downside is that it is not very user-friendly. It requires advanced knowledge to install and modify.



3. Open.CMS
   Open.CMS is one of the simplest CMS systems. It is free and is quick and simple to use. One of its biggest features is that it's super easy to install and edit without excessive server load. A downside to Open.CMS is that it does not have many plugins and themes like in other CMS's. Functions that are comparable to other bigger CMS's are only available in the paid version.

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