Posted by on Jun 14, 2011 in My Business Adventures, Webdesign | 0 comments

So I’m spending a lot of my days lately evaluating Content Management systems (CMS). Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, Expression Engine, etc. It’s got my head spinning really.

If you’re not familiar with web development, basically what these things do is provide a back-end system where you, the website owner, would be able to log in and maintain your site with little or no HTML experience. You don’t have to contact your web designer and wait till he or she has the time to update that old telephone number you posted up last year.

That’s the hope of course. In practice, some of these systems achieve this goal better than others, and no one CMS can claim to do everything perfect. And sometimes the CMS ends up being more trouble and more of an investment than it’s worth.

I’m trying to eliminate these options down to one CMS where I can really dig deep over the next couple months and become somewhat of specialist in it. I’m digging up sites, I’m reading forums, I’m checking out sales info, etc. What does it cost?  Is it easy to set up? Can I keep the core structure of my design templates? Is there support?  Can I find good books for reference? Would I be able to each this CMS to my next client easily?

So far it’s looking like WordPress and Expression Engine are my top two choices. One would be a popular open-source “free” platform (which I’ve used before), the other a paid commercial CMS with all the support & licensing trappings that come with it (never used it but some of my favorite sites rests on EE). Which one…which one….which one….