You may be familiar with Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress and Drupal, which let you easily add new content to your website without hiring a developer or programmer to set up the database structure or write code for you. But it’s important to use the right CMS for your site so that your site runs smoothly, looks great, and has all the features you need to manage it on your own later on down the road. This article lists 10 tips for choosing the best CMS for your website or web application.
1) Reduce the Number of Changes Between Releases
Though it’s important to make changes between each release, you should limit how many changes are actually made. Changing too much at once can result in more bugs and issues with your CMS, requiring more time to fix them. Additionally, if too many updates are being made at once, your users will have trouble keeping up. Your website or app might become even harder to use than it was before—forcing people away from using your product altogether. To get better results with your CMS website development plan, it’s best to stay focused on one aspect of functionality per release cycle. For example, keep an eye on performance during every update cycle but don’t try to optimize everything at once; you risk delivering new bugs without any tangible benefit.
2) Ask Users what they want
If you want to develop an effective CMS, it's important to find out how users work in real life. They may have special requests or limitations, and when your users are happier, they'll produce better content. So don't forget to ask them what they need from their CMS. You can even try building a mockup of your new system and showing it to users before you've written any code. This way, you can catch issues early on and potentially save hours of time down the road.
3) Adopt Good Documentation Practices
The longer you wait to get your product in front of users, either internal or external, the higher chance you have of getting it wrong. At best, users will find your product difficult to use and illogical. At worst, they won’t be able to figure out how to use your product at all. The sooner you test your idea in front of real users—and then change it based on their feedback—the better off everyone will be. You could even go so far as to write out an experimental plan that involves putting potential beta versions of your product in front of actual people before any code is written.
4) Release Early and Often
CMS (Content Management System) development can take years. The temptation is strong to keep your work private until it’s perfect. The reality is that most people won’t like what you develop or care about early versions—it’s simply too much effort to learn something new. So instead of waiting until it’s perfect, try releasing an early version and using real customers to improve it based on their feedback. By getting something out quickly, you can learn if there is interest in your product at all. And by interacting with customers as they learn how to use your product, you can design better experiences than if you had just designed in a vacuum.
5) Test Early and Often
To increase your chance of success, make sure you test early and often. Start with a small sample group of customers and build from there. In order to do that, though, you need to first identify your target audience as clearly as possible. Start with those customers that will benefit most from your product or service—that way, you can concentrate on streamlining usability based on their preferences. Also consider investing in analytics software to help you measure customer engagement with your platform over time. By identifying problems quickly and fixing them accordingly, you can prevent costly system overhauls later on down the line. To increase your chance of success, make sure you test early and often. Start with a small sample group of customers and build from there.
6) Don't Reinvent the Wheel
If you’re new to CMS development, focus on building something specific rather than creating an entirely new platform. While there may be a lot of code out there that looks familiar, don’t rely too heavily on pre-existing solutions. This is an opportunity to learn from mistakes made by those who have come before you, so it pays to know as much as possible about why some approaches aren’t good enough and what you can do to avoid making similar mistakes yourself. In addition, if things go wrong with your build early on and you have no idea how to fix them, having a unique platform won't help you move forward.
7) Use Good Architectural Patterns
The vast majority of content management systems in use today are based on open-source software—meaning they’re free to use and edit. However, if you’re looking to launch a high-traffic website with lots of unique features, you may need something more robust than an open-source CMS. In these cases, proprietary software is often your best bet. Other times, organizations will rely on hybrid systems that give them some level of proprietary customization without going all-in on a single platform.
8) Pick your Toolkit Wisely
For most projects, you’ll use different programming languages to achieve different goals. On one project, you might be developing an entire web app from scratch, while on another you might be creating some custom plugins. It can get confusing when so many frameworks are floating around in your CMS toolkit—but picking the right one for each project will save you time in production and increase your team’s overall productivity.
9) Keep Up Maintenance Efforts Consistently
Your CMS is an ongoing project, meaning you need to make maintenance efforts on it consistently. Having trouble keeping up with your CMS? Don’t worry; we all do. To help you get past any roadblocks, try adding staff to your team who are specifically in charge of maintaining your site. This way, if something goes wrong or needs updating, there’s always someone on staff who can quickly handle any issues that come up.
10) Communicate Well With Your Users
It might seem obvious, but it’s easy to get so caught up in your development process that you forget about your users. Make sure you’re communicating well with them by listening to their feedback and responding to queries efficiently. If they aren’t happy, they won’t use your CMS. So make sure you create an easy-to-use user experience by asking yourself what makes other systems hard to use and avoiding those mistakes! Good luck!
Conclusion
CMS development is so much more than writing code by a CMS website development company. There are plenty of tips and tricks to take into consideration when trying to perfect your CMS, but it all starts with having a good understanding of what makes a great website great. Once you have your users in mind, develop an efficient workflow that makes sense from start to finish, and try not to get lost in all of those tiny details.
