Benefits To You

OK, so the real benefits to you of a CMS are becoming clear.

You love the idea of being able to add or update your own pages any time you want. You absolutely love the idea that all you, or one of your colleagues, have to do is type your text into a word processor-like web page, add images if you like, tick a few boxes and then press "publish" and the web site automatically formats your new page to look exactly like the rest of your web site!

Training, Free of Charge.

Training free of charge is our promise to you. If we build a CMS web site for you we will show you how to get the best from it, free of charge.

At this point, if you don't really want to know anything more about the main types of CMS then please continue on to another tab to read. If you're interested in a very broad over-view of the "techy" choices then please read on.

Types of CMS.

One way of looking at it is there are three main types of CMS; custom written, commercial and "open source".

"Custom written" refers to something written just for you.

"Commercial" is unambiguous, you buy a licence to use such-and-such CMS. The licence usually lasts for 1 year after which to stay up-to-date. If you then need a developer who can mould it into the site you want then its likely to be expensive because they will be quite specialised.

"Open Source" refers to a CMS for which the initial licence means its free of charge.

We prefer "open source" for many reasons, all to do with giving our customers excellent service and value for money.

Please read the text in the next tab for more info about why we prefer open source and why we would suggest is better for you.

Pitfalls of Some Types of CMS

With a commercial CMS you are paying for the licence for the CMS and the probability is its a yearly licence, which means a yearly fee to keep it up to date. (There are certain circumstances when such a system is the best choice for a customer so we will never say never, but we tend to shy away from these because it makes things awkward for customers.)

Custom written CMS is a dead end, once you've gone that route then finding another developer to work or your site is next to impossible. Writing CMS scripts is like writing a letter by hand to the tax man, no two people ever write the same letter even if they achieve the same end result - and reading someone else's hand-writing can be really difficult some times!

A CMS based on open source needs to be chosen carefully because of the apparent myriad of choices available.

The Sensible Option is to defer that choice to us. We will listen to you, listen to what you want, to what you want to achieve and we will make our recommendations based on that.

Value for Money

The core of a CMS that is based on open source is available free of charge, core updates are available as soon as they are published and are, again, free of charge. Hosting your site with us also allows us to apply those updates in a timely manner.

What You Pay For

So if the core is free what are you paying for when we build you a site? Many things, skill, expertise, time (these sites take a lot of time to craft), there is also expertise and support once the site is live. We have many years of experience and knowledge of implementing CMS-based web sites.

No CMS works exactly as you want it "straight out of the box" in fact each and every one of them require many many hours of customisation work to mould them into the web site you want, the web site you are looking for.

Three Choices

There are three open-source CMS platforms available that are head and shoulders above the "competition" on almost every level, from easy of use to how powerful they are. These three are Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal.

Horses For...

... Courses. This is not a "shoot out" between these three platforms, just a solid reflection of our experience, opinion and a very definite eye on what we're trying to achieve: a good solid, effective, sophisticated and polished web site for our customers.

Joomla

Joomla! is a powerful and maturing CMS with literally thousands of developers around the world and many thousands of users, it can be moulded to let you do pretty much anything you want.

Joomla! is used by some very prominent companies as the CMS for their websites, including MTV, Harvard University, and IHOP. It’s suitable for back-end networks, too, and is used by Citibank for just that purpose. Joomla! has been used for everything from inventory control systems to reservation systems, to complex business directories, in addition to normal websites.

Wordpress

Wordpress has an even larger user base, and an equally large developer base. It started life as a blogging platform but has grown in its functionality over the years. It does, however lack certain features; obvious features that are missing are a means of building an on-line photo-gallery and a complete social media-based site. (this may change over time but at present this is the case.

Drupal

Drupal is powerful and has extensive user numbers and developers, although smaller than both Joomla and Wordpress. Drupal is also renowned as being a "techy" CMS, which makes it slightly harder for avaerage users to get to grips with. For that reason we shy away from offering it our customers - We offer you a CMS to make your working life easier and more productive and not more complicated.

We Prefer

We prefer Joomla! for the reasons highlighted above and for one or two others, that are much closer to home. First of all experience (have we mentioned that?), between us here at North East New Media we have many, many years of experience using Joomla! (since its very beginning in fact).

More importantly Joomla! is the best CMS for almost every web site we have come across.