When you’re looking to create, update, or overhaul your business’s website, one of the first questions you’ll be faced with is which Content Management System (CMS) you should use. The factors that go into your decision range from cost, to security, to whether or not the platform supports the functions you need. You can probably even search online to find a bunch of charts and tables where all the features of the most popular CMSs are lined up for easy comparison. But the products on offer from all the major players in the enterprise CMS market are starting to overlap in what they can do. So you can get in the weeds pretty quickly as you try tallying up all the relative strengths and weaknesses of each option. And who’s to say one of the companies isn’t going to release some major upgrade sometime in the near future? If somewhere along the way you find yourself wondering how much your choice of CMS actually matters when weighed against other aspects of your web development planning, rest assured. You’re not alone.
Starting with Use Cases
Once you’ve decided to undertake a web development project, your first thought may be to start generating a wish list of all the features and content you want your site to include. From there, it ought to be easy to go out and find the CMS that meets all your criteria at the lowest cost. But is this really the best way to plan a web project? If instead of thinking of your website as a repository of inert information about who your company is and what it does you think of it as a tool for helping you meet your business goals, you probably won’t want to bother with that wish list of features. Instead, you’ll want to begin with a focus on how people will actually be using the site in various contexts.
Websites used to be thought of as little more than attractively decorated storehouses of information about companies. More and more, though, businesses are recognizing that people come to their websites with a particular goal in mind: finding some piece of information, answering a question, placing an order, and so on. The sites that help visitors accomplish their goals the most quickly and directly tend to also be the ones that help the businesses meet their own goals. The important point here is that if you start with customer use cases and design the site around them then the focus shifts away from simple lists of features onto figuring out how best to develop the site so that it delivers a satisfying experience.
This shift toward use cases means you likely have something to prioritize over your choice of CMS. You need to make sure that whoever is developing your site, whether it be internal staff or some third-party firm, knows what your goals are and how to design the site to achieve them. If a web design team is great at building sites that give your customers exactly the kind of experience they’re looking for, will it matter to you that this team prefers to work with Drupal as opposed to Joomla or Sitefinity?
The Who and How of Web Development
Imagine going online and downloading a bunch of those tables comparing the features and fee structures of various CMSs. After a few consultations with some of your coworkers and some members of your IT staff, you identify the product whose core strengths align most closely with your business needs—all at what appears to be a reasonable price. But then you go to a web development company who specializes in just the type of website you’re looking for, only to find out that they can offer a significant discount on some other CMS because they happen to have a partnership with the company who makes it. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t bother researching CMSs, or that all CMSs are created equal. But the effectiveness of your website as a tool for improving your business will probably be determined more by who you choose to build your site and how they go about building it than it will by which CMS you choose.
The answer to the question of whether or not it matters what CMS you choose to build your website is obviously a resounding yes. But, as long as you’re restricting your search to the major players in the market for enterprise CMSs, you’ll probably find that several other considerations play a big role in your decision. Even more important that choosing the right CMS is choosing the right web team. And the right web team will be the one who makes customer use cases a central part of planning and design. In the end, you want your site to function the way it needs to function to bring you closer to your business goals, regardless of what products or technology it relies on.
