Web Podcast - Episode 5: Choosing a CMS / e-commerce system

Read the transcription of this podcast:

Okay guys, when you’re setting up a website you’re going to need to pick a CMS system.

CMS means content management system. If you’re a company with a site you want five pages on, you’ll use a software like Wordpress. If you’re a retail shop you’ll use a shopping system, like Magento. Not that I personally recommend it, it’s just an example.

You’ve got to pick the correct system. Most systems like Magento, like Wordpress they’re open source, they’re free to download.

The issue with open source is that they can get hacked a lot easier. Anyone worldwide can download the software and fin ways to exploit the code. That means you may get hacked more often and therefore you gotta keep your site more up to date.

If you’re building a site with a web designer, they’re probably going to use Wordpress.
I don’t use them in my business. But, they’re going to generally use Wordpress.

If you’re doing your own website then you’ll probably use Wordpress because it’s cheap and it actually does a good job.

How ever, you shouldn’t use it for anything more than just a simple website.

Don’t do shopping on it, don’t do any crazy features. There's myriads of plug ins available that get developed by different people, they don’t all work together perfectly. You’ll run into roadblocks if you go and use Wordpress and have 100 plugins in it.
If you find sites made on Wordpress I can guarantee you that they’re slower than websites using custom CMS or better built CMS systems like Silver Stripe.

The next important part of CMS is the editing capability. Some web design companies don’t offer their clients the ability to edit their own site, which I find crazy.

A CMS has an editing function in it. You want to be able to go and make changes yourself, you don’t want to have to pay web designers $100s to change a few pages for you. You’ll want to do it yourself.

It’s important to do it yourself as you may be sitting on a Sunday morning and then get the urge to write a blog post. Your web designer will be at home drinking coffee (like I am), he’s not going to be waiting for you to call him on a Sunday.
You want to be able to edit the site yourself. You want o be able to edit it easily.

When someone builds you a site, or you build your own site using Wordpress, make sure the CMS has a good editing tool in it.

Usually these are called drag and drop editors.

However again, there’s restrictions around what is good and what isn’t. A baseline is just to look out for something that has a drag and drop editor. Unless you can code, like we can, then it’s a good idea to have a drag drop editor. When I say that, you can basically decide where you place tables, or text and images.

So, it allows you to visually build the website, without having to know any code.
That’s important if you don’t know code. Trust me it takes a while to learn code.

In summary, make sure you get a good CMS software, make sure the web designer allows you to edit it yourself and also ensure it is using a drag and drop editor.

If you’re doing a shop, if you want to sell online, you can use Shopify. Shopify is quite good software, it’s all online, easy to use. You can still customise it a lot.
On the other hand, it’s limited in functionality. For most people it will do fine.

You can also use X-Cart, which is a free software that you install on your web-server. Again if you read my web hosting post, it’s always a good starting point too.

That was episode five guys, I hope you enjoyed it. I’ll go into more detail about content soon.
How to maximise for best ranking as well as marketing it and getting it right for your clients.

Thats Matt from RAZOR Web at RAZOR Web Design Wire Podcast, thanks, and join us again next time.