Website Planning
What is it that you are looking for in your site? What would you like your site to do? How often are you planning on updating your site? Would you like to have the ability to change your site? Well these are some of the questions that we ask a client that comes to us wanting a site. Most people don’t understand that their is much more to a site then just having a idea of “I need a site” or “my company needs a site.” With these questions that I have asked it starts me thinking would it be better for my client to have a CMS or not. A CMS is a Content Management System it is used to give the buyer the ability to make small changes to the site pages in case they may need to change some text or something little. Once I find out that my client may need a CMS then comes the point of giving the client a CMS that will work with their needs. For instance if a client came to me and said that they would like a site that has a blog area that they could update daily. The first thing that comes to my mind is Wordpress. Let alone Wordpress is very user friendly it has so many capabilities and plugins that are free. If my client came to me and said that they would like a site that they would only have to change about every 6 months or more. I would probably look at either building the site with static information or using a smaller CMS. My personal preference would be Frog CMS. It is easy to learn and is easy to customize because of its small size. Their are a lot of different opinions on what is the best CMS. I don’t really think their is a “best” I feel that it really depends on the situation and the developers preference. A short list of some of the free CMS’s out their:
Most Known
Not So Known
- Frog CMS
- Media Wiki
- Typo3 CMS
- Moodle
- Dolphin
- Pligg CMS
- Movable Type
- Xoops
- Geeklog
- e107
- Mambo
- Nucleus CMS
My Opinion
This is just a few of the vast amount of CMS’s out their that you can choose from. Note that all of these are free open source CMS’s. I have mt own opinion about these CMS’s and I believe even though Drupal and Joomla are two of the biggest CMS’s they are two of the most complicated. I personally would stick with Wordpress for blog sites and for smaller sites I would go with Frog CMS but this is my personal opinion. I would say defiantly try out multiple CMS’s to see what you build a preference to. If you have tried out any of the CMS’s on the list or any that are not on the list please feel free to leave a comment about them.
Web Design And Development
If you by change need web design or web development done to one of your sites you can get in contact with me or you can contact Chosen. Chosen is a Lansing based Web Development, Web Design, Web Hosting, and Web Marketing firm. We are small but are growing in the Lansing Area for our Web Design and Development skills. We have done work for clients and companies. We prefer client work but we also take contract work. We have worked with most of the biggest web companies in the Lansing Area and all the way out to California. We would love to hear from you.
