CMS and why its Awesome
I don’t care which CMS you claim is the best. I’ve played with Joomla, then Modx, Wordpress, and my latest crush Expression Engine. They all have their pro’s and con’s. Some still more favoriable over another, but they are all great. Why? Because with the right support and setup there is no need to know anything technical. I was recently meeting with a friend, and client, going over his website design. He finally asked me how is he going to be able to update and add content. Thats when his “a ha!” moment happend. He doesn’t need to know any HTML, CSS, JQuery, PHP, or anything. All he needs is the content.
A good CMS allows the designer and developer to create a foundation and a frame so that the client, content provider, can fill it with what they want. I showed him a demo backend of how easy it was going to be to make a new entry, create a poll, and to even add testimonials to his site. All he needed to do was fill out a form and the CMS setup by me will format and do everything for him. Sure I could have made him a static page and been done already, but neither him nor I would want to deal with each other every time he wanted to add anything.
I may not be the most experienced in web design but I’ve played with enough of these systems to know their strengths and weaknesses. now a quick run down:
- Joomla: I don’t like joomla.
- Modx: great for PHP developers, very open but not the most intuitive or best for non techie clients, trust me.
- Wordpress: great for blogging out of the box, but tends to get over complicated when doing dynamic complex content.
- Expression Engine: overkill for a plain blog (IMHO) great for the more complex site that has dynamic content. One that requires blog updates, news updates along with the ability to pull content that meet certain criteria to a page.
In the future I’ll be sure to give a better run down of technical details for Expression Engine and Wordpress. As you may notice this site is driven by Wordpress while my more recent clients that want a more complex site get Expression Engine.
