A good resource for screening Content Management Systems (CMS) is CMS Matrix. They list over 1100 different CMS software solutions. But I can make this easy for you. The top 3 open source CMS products for a number of years have been WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. Let me make it even easier for you. Choose WordPress.
Why not Drupal? Drupal is used by the Whitehouse. It is excellent software allowing you to create just about any website design you can imagine.
But Drupal’s own website admits that there is a steep learning curve to mastering Drupal and recommends you don’t undertake it unless you are willing to commit the time to understanding and learning Drupal.
I want a CMS that is flexible yet easy to learn and use. Drupal fails on the easy to learn and use criteria. Perhaps if it was all that was available it would be worth learning – but it isn’t. Perhaps Drupal would be a good choice if you aren’t interested in maintaining or administering your site yourself because you have a professional staff who has learned it. But one of the attractions to modern CMS software is that most people can use it to post new content and edit existing content without needing a developer.
I put Drupal up on my development server some years ago and update it from time to time. I had once actually developed a live site in Drupal. But having been away from it and knowing what else is available made it clear that the effort to re-learn Drupal just wasn’t worth my time. It definitely isn’t worth the time of my clients unless they intend to pay for an administrator.
Why not Joomla? I developed client sites exclusively in Joomla for several years. The client’s I had at that time were small business owners who wanted their site to look like the big corporate sites. They weren’t ready for blogging. Social media didn’t yet have the importance it does now. Joomla allowed me to easily build sites that looked like corporate sites. It had, and perhaps still has many good features.
But the new 1.6 version has been in the works for a long time now and is still not ready. And although I can train someone on the basics of Joomla use in an hour or two – it is sufficiently difficult that most people will be confused when they return after a few months absence. It is not obvious how to do things. Updates are also not automated and most users are not prepared for FTP and console access to their web server in order to apply updates.
Joomla also doesn’t handle URLs as nicely as WordPress does (when used with an essential SEO plugin). If you want to blog, you would want WordPress anyway.
Why WordPress? The first website I developed for a company was done in WordPress. Perhaps that makes me partial to it. But I didn’t stay with WordPress because back then it took a lot of custom code to make WordPress look like anything other than a blog.
If you wanted to blog, WordPress was always a top choice. Since that first website project, WordPress has rapidly matured and added many great features. The WP 3.0+ version makes it easy to create websites that have a corporate look. Easy-to-use features include drag and drop menu creation and one button update of all your software. However, the internet has also changed since my first website. Clients who don’t want to blog are not going to be competitive. Social media is essential for most market niches and WordPress allows you to easily integrate social media tools.
There really is only one alternative to WordPress for the small to medium sized business owner who wants to attract clients or customers. That alternative is HubSpot.
Hubspot vs WordPress? I love WordPress but Hubspot definitely had some great features if you are trying to move your web site visitors through a sales funnel – from visitor to prospect to lead to client/customer. Basically Brilliant! (this site) is a division of On the verge, incorporated – a CRM consulting company which is now a Hubspot partner and reseller and is Certified in inbound marketing by Hubspot.
Hubspot is a complete solution geared to capturing leads on your website and turning them into customers. I believe Hubspot provides the value that justifies the expense – it isn’t free. However, many Hubspot features can be incorporated into WordPress (which is free) – only without as much automation and perhaps not quite as elegantly. If you currently can’t afford the investment in Hubspot, then you can get most of the benefit by using WordPress and by putting in a little more effort.
Of course if you just want to run a personal blog, then WordPress is the only sensible
