That is the question. Should your new small business website be a Content Management System (like Drupal, Wordpress or Joomla) or a site built with software like Dreamweaver or with straight HTML/PHP programing? There are advantages and disadvantages to both classes of website technologies.
The main advantage to using a content management system as a framework is that content is easy to update. This is great if the website owner plans to be actively engaged in creating content, either through having a blog, making changes to website pages, updating calendars, regular additions to photo galleries, ecommerce product additions, or in frequently making other changes to the website. A system like Drupal can also be terrific for civic organizations that are working to build an online community with user profiles, preferences and inter-community dialogue. For a dynamic website, the power, scalability and flexibility of a CMS framework is hard to beat.
Some of the downsides are that it can initially be more difficult to setup because of the need to customize a framework theme, to plan for site content and in choosing from a shopping list of great features. Ongoing, it also takes a committment to spending the time to make the content updates. Many people plan to take the time, but actually find it difficult to schedule into a busy work week. It can then fall back on the website designer/design company to make routine changes to content that could more cost effectively be made by others. CMS frameworks are also constantly going through updates and revisions, some of them being critical security patches. Keeping the framework current typically involves ongoing maintenance by the website designer/maintainer.
You may hear that a CMS framework is needed for the "Web 2.0" look, but this "look" can be achieved by a good designer using most other web design tools.
The bottom line is that a new small business website design should use a CMS framework if the website owner plans to frequently update site content (like in a blog) and wants to handle these updates internally, has large quantities of information that need to be managed (newsletters, announcements, articles or white papers), needs a powerful and flexible system for easy growth, or wants an integrated design look in building an online community.
(The next post will discuss other design options.)
