What is a Content Management System (CMS)? Simply put, it's a tool for you and your team to create, manage, and distribute different types of content to your customers. Almost any type of business has a need for this kind of tooling, no matter the size or focus. It comes in handy when you are a small company and you need to publish simple blog posts, when you seek support for your digital marketing purposes, or when you’re as huge as news portals and magazines, whose business is pretty much entirely based on such tools.
How to select a CMS? What to look for? In cooperation with Jake Lumetta from ButterCMS, we put together 10 useful tips that will help you to choose the right CMS according to your needs.
1. Make use of a ready-made CMS solution, don’t build your own
The CMS tooling market is very mature, as this domain has been thoroughly explored, and I’m willing to bet that you will find tools that already exist and suit your needs. You should go for it and choose one of those. It will save you time and money. Building your own custom CMS is a big investment; all the more challenging when you have specific requirements too.
But of course, there are a few rare instances when it's better to create your own CMS. A good example is a huge magazine or a media house. To succeed in this highly competitive environment, every second counts, and a custom CMS tailored to your specific requirements thus represents a great competitive advantage.
2. Don’t lock yourself in
Whatever CMS you end up choosing, make sure that you can access the data at any time. All data should be easy to extract and export. It is not rare that--due to pivots in business--the original solution (that was initially great) cannot fulfill new business and tech requirements anymore, and you are forced to migrate all your data to a different platform. As simply and quickly as possible, of course.
For example, ButterCMS supports exporting all of your blog posts in a single click.