Mountain Pine Design Blog

SEO and CMS

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a topic that we could spend days and days and days on until we're blue in the face but we'll keep it brief here. Out of the box a content management system (CMS) could kill you - especially if you're redoing your current site with any kind of search engine ranking. Fortunately though, you don't have to get killed and it's easy to avoid it.

There are a few simple things that you can do to make sure that your site is compliant and you will not be overlooked by search engines. Most CMS's, by default, access your database to grab content and they do this through the URL. Unfortunately the URLs tend to look like the following:

http://www.yoursite.com?note=6

This just isn't good for SEO but it can be easily fixed so that the URL of the same page appears as follows:

http://www.yoursite.com/contact.html

In addition to URLs, it is important to be extra-dilligent in your use of "header tags", something that is usually taken care of by your attentive web developer. Now that you're running the show through your new CMS, it is up to you to make sure you understand how, where and when to use the appropriate headers so tha your page gets seen.

Again we're just skimming the surface here but the long and short of it is that half of the work is building a website and the other half of it is making sure that it can be seen by search engines. There is a myth out there that states that using a CMS will kill your SEO - that is simply not true. If not properly deployed, developed and configured, you could run into problems but with a little bit of care and attention to detail you will have no problems.

Related article: SEO and CMS:How will a CMS impact my SEO efforts? from iData Technologies.

Okay, Now Which CMS?

Seemingly today Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal are considered the three best open-source Content Management Systems (CMS) and with that being said, I will keep my thoughts on that track. I've had experience using each, and know the general ins and outs of using, developing, configuring, administering and deploying the systems. I've done a bit of reading about what others have encountered between the systems and what I have laid out below is a mish-mash of my own experiences and the experiences of others.

Wordpress was built as a dedicated blogging application. In the past year or so it has only really begun to emmerge as a CMS build on top of the architecture originally developed for blogging. While Wordpress is considered the absolute best applicaton for blogging (I heartily agree), it is considered the underdog in the world of open-source CMS's. Drupal and Joomla, on the other hand, were designed under the framework of a CMS from the get-go. Both Drupal and Joomla have huge user communities of thousands of developers around the world that are constantly tweaking existing add-on modules and developing new ones.

It is important to consider that each system has its inherent strengths and weaknesses but ultimately they all perform the same general tasks. The key is to define your needs and pick the CMS that best will help you accomplish your goal. Lets take a look at the systems:

Wordpress By far the quickest setup and most user-friendly CMS out there. The problem again is that Wordpress just is not a native CMS. If you are looking to get some info out on the web ASAP, use Wordpress. Wordpress has the greatest number of themes available for use by far and allow you to quickly "customize" the look of your webpage by downloading and installing one of these themes. Wordpress, again by it's very nature, is the clear frontrunner in its blogging capabilities, supporting categorization, commenting, pinging services, multiple blogger profiles, trackbacks and more. The problem with Wordpress is that it is a system that was built to work out of the box without any modifications. It is not developer-friendly and is as such not a flexible system for expansion and growth. In fact, many users complain that once a core system has been built and launched, adding new features or plug-ins to the site often times causes the whole thing to break and/or disappear. For your investment in a CMS, I'd recommend staying away from Wordpress and choosing it only as a driver for the means of a dedicated blogging website.

Joomla Joomla is what I like to call the "middle ground" in the CMS world. Joomla users love the user interface because of its ease of use but it is still not quite as intuitive as the user interface that is built into Wordpress. The sections and categorization systems are a little bit counter-intuitive from the beginning but once you understand the basic organization, its smooth sailing all the way. From the development standpoint, Joomla is much better than Wordpress but is not quite as versitile as Drupal. Joomla's user community is huge and that is an advantage when creating full-on websites, allowing you to pull from a larget talent pool for add-on modules and the like. There is a bit of a draw on the development side, however, in that Joomla's core code isn't quite as flexible and able to be modified with the ease that you can with Drupal. As such, this presents some limitations within the framework of the system.

Drupal Drupal is the clear front-runner in the CMS world for developers. Developers love Drupal. Many feel that being given a fresh Drupal is like being handed a mound of clay and being asked to create. Drupal provides the flexibility that Wordpress and Joomla do not from the standpoint of tweaking the underlying core code to achieve the results that you desire. The draw to Drupal is that just because it is developer-friendly, that doesn't necessarily mean that it is user-friendly. The system itself isn't overly complex or unfriendly and it can be easily learned but from the get-go, the system is admittedly not as intuitive to non-developers as a system such as Wordpress. Drupal, like Joomla, has a gigantic user and developer community, making life grand as you need to expand your site to grow with your needs. Drupal can be used to create anything from a simple informational site to a complex site that can outperform many other existing sites out on the web.

Conclusion If you're looking for a true CMS, stay away from Wordpress - the risks highly outweigh the benefits of your investment. Wordpress is your go-to blogging tool - use it for that - it is amazing! Between Joomla and Drupal, I tend to highly lean towards the use of Drupal. Drupal provides the greatest amount of flexibility, functionality and the ease-of-use is just as simple as Joomla after about a 5-minute lesson from your friendly and knowledgable web developer.

Some articles to check out:

• Drupal, WordPress, or Joomla? (A Trick Question) from Aaron Winborn (August 14th, 2008).
• Wordpress vs Joomla vs Drupal from Good Web Practices (March 9th, 2009).
• Drupal VS Joomla VS Wordpress - Which Is The Best CMS? from Slayerment (December 17th, 2007).

Oh the Complications!

I read a great post the other day over at Friendly Bit regarding the evolution and complication of web site development variables. The points highlighted are, no doubt, all too familiar for developers, but it skims the surface and begins to lend some insight to those who may not have a grasp of what it takes to develop a fully functional and flawless website.

The post: When web development was easy... from Friendly Bit.

So You Want A CMS?

Great! So you've decided that you want a content management system (CMS)? There a few things that you must understand.

Flexibility. A CMS can be an amazing tool, allowing you to disperse the most up-to-date information to your audience in a fast, simple and efficient way. If you've ever used MS-Word then you can be up and using a CMS in no time at all. A well-built CMS tool offers you the golden key into the world of web development without having to learn a line of computer code.

Growth. A CMS is the perfect tool that lets you add onto it as you and your needs grow. To start out with, most people are looking to simply convey information through their website. This can be achieved through a base CMS package. Later on this person may find that they need a way to send out a monthly email to those who would like to subscribe to the latest news. This can be achieved easily with a CMS by adding, or "plugging-in" a pre-built "module" that accomplishes this task. Some of the more popular CMS open-source communities are so large that a plugin exists for almost any needs that you might have.

Cost. Up front, a CMS can easily cost multiples of what a standard-build (static) website would cost. Like many things in life, there is a tradeoff blanace that you achieve over time. As time progresses you will inevitably incur costs as you find that you need additions, updates and modifications to your static site. With a properly-built CMS, however, you should not run into these issues. You can add/remove pages, modify menu items, add/remove content, and that should be all you need for minor day-to-day changes. Again though, you pay for the flexibility associated with a CMS up front and reap the benefits over time, especially when adding modules or increased functionality in the future.

Design Limitations. Out-of-the-box CMS's are built to be powerful, flexible and capable of growing with you. The fact is, though, that the more complex the layout or design of the website, the less flexible your CMS will be, as a system. For instance, a tailored and highly customized menu system can make a site look tremendous. Often times, implementing such a system would require the use of image buttons to realize this vision. So doing effectively takes you out of the framework of the CMS for the navigation menu system. Your site will still function - it will still run off of the content you enter and you will have the ability to modify any of the pages but now if you need any modifications to the menu system, you have to go back into your custom code to make modifications.

Content. Along the same lines of the Design Limitations, a CMS is just that - Content Management. The true purpose of a CMS is to hold content in a designated location on each page. Creating and formatting text, images, links, and the like are all natives and adhere to the intended purpose of a CMS. Application programming, custom scripts and the like are not native. This type of content and associated effects can be achieved but this again will take you out of the realm of editable content and back into custom code. This is not to say that your site has to be boring - if, however, you are looking for a lot of interactivity on your site, a CMS may not be the best choice after all.

I need a website! ...but what kind?

There used to be a time, not too long ago, when a webpage was like a rock - static. Things were (hopefully) built in a manner that allowed for cross-site changes to be easily made but inevitably if you needed a change made, you had to put in a call to your friendly neighborhood web developer. Fast forward to the current day. Content Management Systems (CMS) are gaining popularity at an unbelievable rate of speed. With more people blogging or Twittering or updating their profiles on Facebook, the masses are becoming more and more accustomed to publishing content to the web through a browser-based platform.

It seems only natural that you'd want full and total control over your entire website. And with the technology today, it should be easy to set up, right? Wrong.

While different CMS solutions are built to work "out of the box", they require countless hours of setup, configuration, customization and the dreaded "unforseen" to realize a full solution.

One of the greatest benefits of using a CMS is the concept of "modules".

If you are looking for a highly customized site where ever page is different, a CMS is not for you.