CMS or Content Manager System must be installed for each website. It is important to choose such a system just before site development and not only a developer but also a client is responsible for this choice because the client must understand what will be installed in order not to blame everybody for bad work of his web resource. If you wish it will be possible to change constrained CMS for another system but in the end everything will be spoiled and you will have to create another site. That’s a shame because you have to pay again. There are free and fee-paying CMS and no third is given. In their turn fee-paying CMS can be divided into box and self-written systems. Free CMS are ready-made box products. The examples of these popular systems are 1C- Bitrix, Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress and so on. What is a box CMS? It is like a big box with a lot of things put there by different programmers. One developer invented any website function, put into the box, attached the instructions and put into the corporate box and so on. Any website developer can use such a system. Self-written CMS’s are carefully created by the programmers of any specific web studio, kept only for personal usage and shared with nobody. It is clear because it’s like a unique recipe of grandmother’s pie which can be only propagated in the family.
What to choose - free or fee-paying CMS’s?
Technical support of free CMS’s offers cooperation with two services. The first one is the developers whose box you are using and the second one is a programmer who developed your site with this system. It sounds good but in fact everything is much more difficult. If you have a problem, you will see none of them near you. The developers of CMS will blame the website creators and those ones will refer to the first ones. This endless circle will take you a lot of time. And here is a great advantage of technical support by those developers who created your site with the self-written system because you will know who is to blame. Moreover, such approach is individual if the web studio you cooperate with is responsible and the contract is correct. In this case you have a chance to make away with faults as soon as possible. If your website needs unique solutions you have found them and can’t sleep until they are placed on the web resource, free systems won’t help you. Such things are written by developers and supported by them in future. Another disadvantage of free CMS is plenty of documents which need too much time. If you use a self-written system there won’t be so much paper-chase but if you need documentation it will be produced for you.
Free CMS’s promise higher security than self-written CMS’s. But what can we see as a result? The code of CMS developed in the web studio is secret and it’s impossible to find out while the information about soft spots of box systems appears from time to time. Administration of self-written system is its great advantage. All box systems need some skills, information and nerves to find out how to add a picture on the site. At the same time qualified specialists who developed a self-written system cared for you and made it maximally convenient and easy in use. So it lets you feel a real content manager. All other factors depend on the developer. Choosing a system you should pay attention to the person who will develop your website. Even following the recipe any cake can be spoilt if it is backed by a person who can only chop vegetables for salad.
