Rand Fishkin wrote a good post yesterday about how to decide whether a content management system is necessary for your business. I think for most small businesses a CMS is a good idea, but I do take issue with one of Rand’s larger points.

His graph is easy to follow. You’ll have to check it out yourself. In a nutshell, he says you need a content management system if you answer ‘Yes’ to any of the following questions:

• You need to update your website more than once a month
• You’re planning to run a blog on your website
• Will non-web developers be updating the content on your site?
• Will you need to manage your content from a remote location?

I agree with his conclusion on all but one of those points. He recommends a CMS is you answer Yes to any of those questions, but if you plan to run a blog and your response to the other three questions is ‘No’ then I’d caution against a CMS. The reason is because all you need to run a blog is WordPress, an open source blogging platform. You can install WordPress on any domain name and use it with a static website whether you use a CMS or not. You might even get better performance without a CMS.

I know that Joomla’s blogging application is less than desirable. If you use Joomla, you’re better off installing WordPress, and WordPress is SEO-friendly. It is also compatible with Joomla.

That said, I do agree with Rand’s assessment of content management systems and SEO necessities. By the way, Joomla has a problem with Rand’s sixth point - intelligent categorisation structure. Quite frankly, I’ve found it to be a pain in the arse.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 3:22 pm and is filed under Content Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.