Investing in a CMS is a good idea for many businesses, offering plenty of benefits in terms of increased empowering staff to perform faster and more efficiently, improving productivity and ROI. However, different businesses and industries have varying needs when it comes to the functionality and performance of a CMS, so it really pays to plan thoroughly to ensure the right one is deployed.
Bearing this in mind, we’ve put together a checklist of high-level items to consider before settling on the best CMS vendor for your company.
The CMS Checklist
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Multilingual – Can the CMS cater for any language both on the front and back end?
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Scalable architecture – Can the software be load balanced across multiple web servers? Is it cluster aware? Can it perform under pressure or does it fail whale? Ask for 3rd party test results.
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Migration tools – Does it come with tools or methods for migrating tens of thousands of pages of content?
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Web standards – Can it produce clean, semantic HTML and accessible content?
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Documentation/support – Is it backed up with appropriate technical documentation and user guides? Is the product supported locally by a team of developers?
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Installers – Does it have a simple 1 click installation, or is an army of engineers required to make it work?
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Secure – Ask the vendor when the application had its last security review. Does it have formal accreditation?
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Usability – Where does the user interface sit on the hierarchy of users’ needs? Is it easy-to-use? Is technical assistance required?
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Extensible – Does it have a mature API or SDK allowing it to be easily integrated or extended?
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Search – Is a comprehensive search engine ‘baked in’ or will you need to buy an expensive 3rd party tool? From an external perspective is the CMS SEO friendly?
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Metadata – Is the content underpinned by a robust metadata framework or is information management a manual task?
Does Your CMS Fit These Requirements?
Not all of these requirements are essential for everyone but asking these questions will definitely tell you if the product is a mature and stable offering.
The larger vendors excel at many of the checkpoints but often fall short on usability. It’s usually the opposite for the smaller players. It’s no wonder low end CMS’s have made such a dent in the market, but these offerings can be lacking in other key areas such as security and migration.
It is often the mid-tier vendors such as the Elcom CMS platform that tick the most boxes because they usually pre-date the large enterprise players, come with out-of-the-box features that are easy-to-use but are customisable, and have the advantage of being agile, coupled with extensive industry knowledge and experience.
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