The Best Ecommerce CMS for You
Creating a new website often starts with choosing which content management system, or CMS, to use. An outdated or under-supported website application can lead to higher administration times and difficulty with everyday maintenance. Whether starting a new website, or updating a current one; picking a content management application that suits your needs can save time in the long run.
Why use a CMS?
New websites take advantage of many of the features that we have come to expect from modern websites. Responsive design, rich content, and features comparable to desktop software. Starting a website with a blank slate would take many months and the end result would be less than desirable.
Building on some of the fundamental frameworks that others have created allows for a much quicker development process. Time previously spent on graceful degradation can now be spent on enhancing aesthetic appeal, functionality, and marketing.
Content management systems put the emphasis back on content. Our website designers and developers take care of the ugly work so you can focus on what’s important to your visitors; creating engaging content and making sales.
As with most things in life; online content management is less than perfect. Keeping your website up-to-date is vital when using a CMS, as security patches may be released or user experience issues fixed. However an issue that can be encountered fairly often is the lack of a user-friendly update process, so creating a backup is essential if done on a live website.
Other than security and updating the core components of the application, there are few reasons to choose a custom solution at present. Some programming gurus are capable of creating beautiful, secure, websites; it isn’t a necessity for most.
Our top 3 CMS
Deciding what matters can be difficult. We tend to judge the value of a CMS based on three things; ease of development, ease of maintenance, and ease of use. It’s essential that everyday maintenance is as simple as the general guest experience. Owning a beautiful website shouldn’t be at the expense of content curation.
Below is our short-list of the best content management applications for websites.
OpenCart
If you plan to sell physical items from your website, you will need a shopping cart. We veer towards OpenCart for this as it is a good starting point from which we can build exceptional sites. Out-of-the-box it isn’t amazing at anything, but with a few tweaks it can look great and provide a good return on investment.
ModX
ModX is the Swiss Army Knife of website content software. It allows code snippets, template variables and other stuff to keep the developers entertained. Most tasks can be accomplished from within the administration panel, which saves opening several programs to make a simple change.
WordPress
Around one in four websites currently use WordPress with one of the biggest development communities. It was created as a blogging application but is found as the core of many websites. An extensive plugin library and development flexibility makes it a good base for a variety of businesses.
Our Favourite
WordPress is the weapon of choice for the designers and developers at MB Web. It strikes a good balance between extensible development and user-friendly design. Our in-house development team prefer to spend time making exceptional websites. With a good design, some custom code, and a little care and attention WordPress can help turn clicks into clients.
If you want to find out more about the different available CMS, or if you want to talk to us about your web design, or web marketing needs then please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. You can contact James Golding by filling out our contact form, by sending an email to hello@juddassoc.com or by calling our Lewes office on 01273 478822 to speak to a friendly member of the team.