CMS Website Builder
There are thousands of companies out there who are now beginning to realise that their original website design has run its course and is in need of replacing with a more flexible and contemporary approach utilising a reputable CMS website builder.
A content management system or CMS is basically a fully featured website you have control over yourself to upload and change images in your galleries, copy and content on a web page.
Back in the day most websites were created by using downloadable software. At eapb we still use Dreamweaver from Adobe for web design, which is a superb piece of web design software, however it’s basically the only contender still standing and it’s designed for professionals, not your average business owner.
Today many millions of websites have been built using a number of well known and outstanding CMS website builder offerings such as those listed below. However, before we introduce the following 5 alternatives it is worth providing a definition of CMS:
WCMS (web content management system) is a software system that provides website authoring, collaboration, and administration tools designed to allow users with little knowledge of web programming languages or mark-up languages to create and manage website content with relative ease.
WordPress
WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. It is an online, open source website creation tool written in PHP. It is quite possibly the easiest and most powerful blogging and CMS in existence today.
WordPress started as just a blogging system, but has evolved to be used as full content management system and so much more through the thousands of plugins and widgets and themes, WordPress is limited only by your imagination.
From a simple brochure website to an advanced e-commerce solution with an integrated forum or membership website, WordPress has got you covered.
We design the majority of our customer websites using WordPress. Themes can be acquired for free, bought and paid for off the shelf or custom designed.
Joomla
Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. It’s easy to use, even for non-technical people, and being open source, it’s freely available to everyone. This means you avoid the expensive developer costs of custom-built platforms.
Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla one of the most popular web site software available. The release of Joomla 3.0 establishes a new goal for Joomla: the mobile platform.
Concrete5
Concrete5 was released as an open-source CMS in 2008 and has rapidly grown in popularity since. Although the core system is open-source, additional functionality is distributed through Concrete5 marketplace as add-ons. Add-ons are largely commercialised.
Concrete5 is a content management system (CMS) that allows multiple editable regions on one page. With this CMS, you do not need to understand HTML. It is free and open-source, so there is no need to pay any hidden, ongoing charges to use it.
There is a large community base with many users responding quickly to questions. C5 has forums, newsletters, and other means of communication including chat. There is a lot of useful documentation available on the site. It is a very flexible platform that can be used for almost any type of site. It’s better suited for general web sites than for web sites with one or two very specific features.
Drupal
Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world.
Drupal is widely recognised as a leading open source content management platform, which is secure, robust, feature rich, flexible and scalable. This CMS comes with many tools to help you organise, structure, find and re-use your content.
You can manage your website content with an easy-to-use web interface. Drupal’s flexibility handles countless content types including video, text, blog, podcasts, and polls with robust user management, menu handling, real-time statistics and optional revision control.
Magento (E-Commerce)
Magento offers flexible, scalable e-commerce solutions designed to help you grow and succeed on the Internet. Often described as a cost-effective technology platform which makes it possible for you to control the content, functionality, look and feel of your online store.
Magento provide support, services and training to help ensure the client’s ultimate success. Their network of partners and certified developers offer expertise and resources to help design, build and host your store. Their partners also offer thousands of apps and extensions to help you add custom features and functionality.
Paul Brewster, August 2014