Get the right CMS

A Content Management System (CMS) is the backbone of your website or digital platform and enables your business to achieve a greater customer experience and more engagement with your consumers. When considering your CMS it’s important to take the time to understand what you need from it so to help you on your way we’ve put together the key considerations you’ll need to take on board to give you that head start and return on investment.

VALUE FOR MONEY

Make sure to do a cost-benefit analysis not only of the ownership of the CMS in terms of licence, hardware, implementation and ongoing operating costs but also the costs of training, staffing, maintenance and upgrades of the system in future years. This way you’ll get a better perspective on your return on investment.

ON PREMISE OR CLOUD SOLUTION

An on premise solution has many advantages such as full ownership, greater security and flexibility in customisation. However, there are some disadvantages such as high upfront costs, longer time to market as you’d need to set up the complete infrastructure before it is made available to your developers and staff to manage and maintain.

For a cloud solution, benefits include no upfront hardware procurement costs only usage-based cost, faster availability for development, better support for scalability requirements or auto-scaling and reduced IT staff. On the flipside with this solution you’ll have reduced security and flexibility as compared to an on-site premise solution.

USABILITY

• Your CMS should meet the needs of both the Marketing/Content and your IT teams. From a marketing perspective the solution needs to have a simple interface for making content updates and does not require them to know programming. However, IT teams need to have a solution that is scalable, secured, reduces their implementation effort and lowers maintenance.
• Implementation: It should fit into your current technology infrastructure therefore, making it easy for people to start using it without major change management.

SPEED

You need to establish if the CMS has required out-of-the-box features, such as ready to use components, templates, automated workflows that help to speed up your implementation, reduce your overall cost and reduce time to value.

INTEGRATION

Your CMS should have the capability to integrate with other third-party applications easily. These may include marketing automation platforms, analytics and personalisation solutions, commerce platforms, and CRM systems. This helps you leverage integration efficiencies and help realise full value with certain use cases.

SUPPORT

Customer support is an important prerequisite when buying any product or service. Therefore, take time to review the level of support the CMS vendor provides. In addition check if training or training manuals are included, or an online support system or customer call centre.

Umbraco is one of the most deployed CMS systems on the Microsoft stack. Umbraco CMS offers the power and flexibility to run anything from pure publishing sites and large media sites, to complex applications for Fortune 500 companies. Massively extendable, there is no limit to what you can do. At 10 Digital (part of the Exasoft Group) we develop utilising Umbraco and have created a wide range of websites for the private, public and voluntary sectors. If you’d like to update your website view our case studies and get in touch!