Shepherd Interactive

Choosing the right CMS (Content Management System) is perhaps the most important decision in the implementation of a new website. A poor choice can lead to lost time and efficiency, unnecessary limitations, difficulty scaling to your company’s future needs, and costly changes down the road. A good choice can save your company money, time, and future re-development.

To determine what CMS is best for your company, start by establishing criteria with which to compare the many options available. At Shepherd Interactive we recommend categorizing your criteria into business objectives, technical objectives, and other miscellaneous objectives and then prioritizing the criteria in each category in order to give more weight to items that are of higher importance. Below is an outline of what your business and technical criteria could look like in a condensed format:

Top 5 Business Criteria

1. Increased Lead Generation
   • Improve search engine rankings
   • Increase quantity of leads
   • Increase quality of leads
2. Foster Brand Identity as a World Leader
   • The ability to provide a consistent brand experience across all products
   • The ability to create a custom look and feel that’s not limited by design templates
   • Fully customizable style sheets and “table-less” design layouts
3. Support Development of New OEM Markets
   • Flexibility to allow for customization for engaging emerging markets
   • Ability for non developers to add new site pages and site sections
4. Support Customer Base
   • Make it easy for visitors of the site to find information
   • Increase interactivity between customers and our company
   • Highest degree of lifetime customer support
5. Workflow & Scalability (Site Maintainability)
   • Simplicity; must be quick and easy to make content updates yet allow for reviews and approvals
   • No proprietary software or technology needed to add features and maintain the site
   • Future growth capabilities (multi-lingual, performance, more pages, and so forth)

Top 5 Technical Criteria

1. Flexible Website Editing (Open Source Technology)
   • Ability to edit key aspects of the site content including navigational names
   • Ability to include/embed images, video, and other media into content areas of a web page
   • Full access to source code and database
   • Use of common non-proprietary technologies (“any developer” approach)
2. SEO Friendly Design & Standards Compliant Coding
   • HTML 5 markup
   • CSS 3.0 compliant
   • Backwards compatibility
   • Mobile Support
   • RSS capabilities
3. Reporting
   • Audit trail of all content managed through the CMS
   • Version control with tools for highlighting differences between two version
   • Content approvals prior to publishing (workflow process)
4. Staging Environment
   • Preview feature for content updates and review
   • Mirrored staging environment for design and feature updates
5. Flexible Updates
   • Ability to update the CMS with security patches, new features, and new versions
   • Scalable to allow for future growth

Other Criteria

1. Leverage existing team skill sets
2. Scalability
3. Low total cost of ownership

By establishing the top criteria for your business or organization, an evaluation matrix can be generated that allows for weighted scoring of viable CMS candidates. Careful evaluation and scoring will uncover potential issues, help rule out some options, and allow a small number of candidates to “rise to the surface.” The evaluation approach can vary from production demonstration to hands-on experience, but it’s best to seek the consultative support of experienced professionals to help ensure the evaluations are as accurate as possible. Misleading evaluation information can be counterproductive to the end goal of choosing the best CMS given the criteria.

At Shepherd Interactive, we’ll condense the findings into vendor summaries highlighting the pros and cons of each CMS vendor that was evaluated. We’ll also make recommendations to aid in the decision-making process, but since we’re a technology-agnostic agency, we ultimately leave the final decision in the hands of our clients so as not to force them to use one technology over another. In the end, the CMS chosen will have been selected for clearly defined reasons, providing assurances that it will be capable of meeting the needs from an organizational perspective as well as a technological perspective.