NEWS » » Which CMS – WordPress, Expression Engine or go bespoke

With our new WordPress powered site live and as WP Web Host are holding a competition to find the ‘Best WordPress Site’, now seems an appropriate time to discuss the various Content Management Systems that we have been working with. For those of you not familiar with WordPress it’s a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards and usability.

The twobelowzero site is built upon the WordPress platform, which we’ve used numerous times in the past and we opted to use WP to see how far we could extend the site using a open-source and free CMS package. At first glance WP looks like any normal off the shelf blogging software, but if you lift the lid and delve a little deeper you’ll find a powerful tool that is built with a clean coded framework brimming with great features and a huge community of users and developers. With such a large array of themes and plug-ins available this is a great free ‘off the shelf’ package that can get you published in no time at all, especially with the detailed documentation (codex) and active help forums. One notable downside is that if your not designing the site yourself most of the skins or themes tend to follow a similar blogging style; but to be fair this is what the software was originally developed for. That said we designed this site without knowing what platform it would be built upon and had no problem integrating it.

Expression Engine is a paid for CMS platform that can be integrated with any website’s XHTML & CSS shell. We have licensed this for various client sites to date with another 3 currently in production. EE is not for the faint hearted, you do need to know what you are doing when it comes to the back-end coding and server configuration. There is quite a learning curve but well worth it as the platform is very powerful and has excellent documentation.

Our third and final offering in our arsenal of CMS’s is building bespoke. For British Waterways Marinas Ltd we opted for this so we could keep the content updates by the 18 marina editors as simple as possible but still have in place a secure tiered administration access. With many other features this option proved successful for this project. We have two more large projects also currently in production where we have opted for a bespoke CMS to fulfil the clients requirements.

The defining factor on what CMS to use is the client. Their needs always vary and we think it’s better to build something that meets these needs, whether that be on a bespoke platform, licensed or even open-source CMS platform rather than try to shoe-horn it into a solution just because that’s what we use and are familiar with.

If you would like to see any of our CMS systems in action just drop us an email or call to arrange a demo.

Don’t forget to visit the WP WebHost site.