Bespoke CMS vs Off-the-Shelf CMS

When considering content management for your website, should you get something off the shelf such as Wordpress or have something built for your needs?

The importance of a Content Management System (CMS)

Content Management shouldn’t be easily overlooked when planning your new website.

It’s as important as the front end that the public see because, after all, you will be responsible for keeping it up to date, looking after search engine optimisation and more. So, it’s important that it works for you, includes the features you need and that it’s easy to maintain.

Off-the-Shelf

You have plenty of choice if you want to get something ready made to fast track your website. Wordpress, Drupal, Magento, Joomla and more are now big brands and platforms that offer feature rich interfaces and frameworks to keep your content going.

Advantages

The biggest advantage with these frameworks is that they are very mature. Advanced features such as user permissions, media management and social media integration out of the box are attractive as you can utilise these even if you’re not planning to use it straight away. Additionally, as they are main stream there are many developers familiar with them so getting support isn’t hard.

Then there is the community and the thousands of plugins available to help add functionality to your site.

Disadvantages

On the face of it, it seems an obvious choice. However, off-the-shelf CMS systems come with plenty of disadvantages to.

Frameworks are typically designed with a particular area of websites in mind. Wordpress is strong with content such as articles and blogs, whereas Magento is the choice for eCommerce.

But your website isn’t likely to cover just a single vertical. This means you need to modify the framework or rely heavily on plugins to get it to do what you want it to do.

Then your originally cost effective website starts to become more expensive. Also, you start to rely on developments outside of the original platform. What was a secure, single platform then has to cope with complicated and potentially less secure bolt-ons. Upgrading becomes more difficult and maintenance either harder.

Then, finally, are the features you don’t use. These tend to make the system more complicated than you need it to be, the interface more confusing and less personal.

Security is a larger issue that it first may seem. As these platforms become more popular they also become a bigger target. Hackers are known to target vulnerabilities in these systems as they know they can hit a large audience with a single exploitation. One such example is a recent Drupal exploit where they have warned users that they have most likely already been comprimised: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-29846539 

Bespoke

The alternative is to have a CMS build for your needs.

Advantages

The biggest advantage to a bespoke CMS is that, put simply, it will do exactly what you want it to do. It will be tailored to the functionality you require, the way you want it to perform and tie closely to the design of your website.

This makes maintenance simple as it will be very much ‘what you see is what you get’ when managing your content – you don’t have to flip back and forth from your CMS to the website to check everything looks like it should.

You have a complete say on how the CMS should perform. Being tailored to your business makes it easy to use and the terminology and layout will be based around your business.

Disadvantages

The biggest disadvantage of bespoke development used to be cost. However, most modern developers will have their own home-grown platform that covers the basics of a CMS such as security, rich text editing and so on. This cuts the cost down as well as the time to develop it.

However, the CMS won’t be open-source, so to move your site to another developer will rely on the ability of your chosen developer to take on the solution.

You will also miss out on the large community of plugins and forums, so extra functionality outside of your original specification may incur extra costs.

Making your choice

As we said, don’t make a choice lightly. Speak with your developer and they should advise you.

Generally speaking, a bespoke solution is going to be the simplest to work with. So, if you are planning to spend a lot of time with your site is probably the best way to go.