Is your organization looking to migrate away from your old yet very popular website with all of its content to a shiny website to be used by your new-gen marketing team? Or, your internal portal is too cumbersome for the non-IT teams (such as HR, admin, infra support etc.) to frequently update?
Even if it’s pretty good, does it require an army of engineers to fix it whenever something goes down or needs a little makeover?
If so, a modern and reliable CMS is what you would be looking for. However, the challenge is, amongst the profusion of available CMS products, it’s hard to decide the best-suited one for your requirements. This article discusses few factors you should consider while evaluating various CMS applications. Assessing your candidate applications on the following parameters would help you narrow down your list and to reach a confident decision:

As reported by Google, Smartinsights and many other agencies, mobile searches now account for nearly 50% of total searches on the search engines. For instance, as of April 2014, searches on mobile devices for search term ‘weather’ were 56% of the total searches as in the below graphic:

Therefore, your CMS must allow for responsive design so that your website can be rendered quite well on various mobile devices, such as tablets, iPhones, large and small screen Android phones etc. as well as on the desktop browsers.
A website that renders geography-specific translations of its text would have greater visibility and ease of use at the non-English speaking geographies. Similarly, a website which changes its currency, date formats, number display formats, salutations as suitable to a visitor’s country would be a delight to use as compared to the rigid uni-language websites. This is why multiple languages, localization and internalization should be supported and should be fairly easy to implement in your chosen CMS. This requirements becomes particularly important if your target users are present all around the globe, particularly, in the non-English speaking continents, such as Europe, Middle East, and South East Asia.

I’ll be discussing about Cloud vs On-premise Deployment, Scalability, and Roles and Permissions in my next post in this series. What factor do you consider while evaluating a CMS? Share with us.