Factors You Should Consider While Evaluating a CMS – Part 1

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:

The first and foremost these days! Whether it’s an internal portal or a customer facing website, its usability decides its fate and drives key performance indicators like bounce rate, time spent per page, and ultimately, the conversion rates. In order to assess how good a CMS would be on usability, you can start checking if its code is compliant with the W3C standards. You can even get your website tested for user experience – IT consulting firm such as JKT have a dedicated team of UX testers that helps you find out the UX issues.

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:

Whether your website is customer facing or an internal one, your customers as well your employees would like to access your website on their devices, while they’re on the move, relaxing at a vacation, in the office, or at home.

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.