Choosing the right CMS is a complex and long process, mainly because of the hundreds of CMS out there that promise they’ll change the way you do business online and that they’ll make your life so much easier.

Fair enough, but the vast majority of CMS don’t even deserve your attention, that’s as simple as that. I hear you: how can all these CMS survive if they don’t deserve my attention? Well, that’s quite simple: not knowing the important considerations when choosing a CMS leads to adopting a CMS that doesn’t fit your needs and then you have to stick with it because the cost of changing platform is too important.

On top of that, we have to face people obsessed by a single CMS like Wordpress. This is dangerous because different CMS are required for different kind of websites. Take Wordpress for example: it’s great for building blogs, but for building a multilingual corporate website, it’s definitely not the right tool. If you are obsessed by Wordpress, I know what you’re thinking at this very moment: “Yes, but what about this or this plugin to give you this or this functionality”. I say native support is way better than most plugin.

So, what are the important considerations when choosing a CMS?

1. What you need and what you’ll need

The first thing you should do is write down the feature set and functionalities you need right now and what you’ll need. What you’ll need is the game, not what you need.

What you’ll need is definitely the most important aspect in choosing a CMS because a web project is always in development. It’s important to think about the next phases of your project as you don’t want to invest a lot of money in building features you knew right from the start you were going to need.

2. Multilingual support

If a you need to support multiple languages, it’s important to consider it from the start. If multilingual support is really important to your business, you want a CMS that support it natively, not by installing some third party plugin. CMS that support multiple languages natively are usually way better than any third party plugin you’ll install.

It’s important to be able to translate the content you write easily, but it should also be easy to translate the “static” part of the website like menus without having to touch the core files of the CMS.

The same goes with the backend of the CMS. Some CMS will offer a multilingual backend and it could turn out to be very important for your business if the people in charge of your website aren’t English native speakers.

3. SEO optimization

We should never have to rely on search traffic, but search engines are there and bring traffic, so it would be stupid to ignore them. Even though the vast majority of CMS are getting better and better at this, you want a CMS that will let you:

• Rewrite URLs to get search engine friendly URLs
• Full control over the titles of the pages or articles
• Full control over the keywords and description meta tags (even though it won’t affect your ranking, you want control over these tags)
• Auto generated code is XHTML compliant as much as possible
• Automatic sitemap generation

A CMS that cover these aspects will at least ensure that your website is search engine friendly and that it follows the basic SEO guidelines.

4. User friendliness

Depending who is going to use the CMS to generate the content, this might or might not be an issue. If a tech-savy user or simply yourself is going to take care of your website, then user friendliness may not be a prerequisite. On the other side, if you’re developing the website for non tech savy users, a user friendly CMS is extremely important. You want to consider:

• Wysiwyg editor to easily create content
• Easy enough to create new pages
• Clear site structure in the backend
• Clear separation between the features most users will need and advanced features

5. Users, roles and permissions

Chances are that multiple persons will have to edit the content of the website. The last thing you want is to authorize all users to modify every aspect of your websites. For this specific reason, assigning roles and permissions to the different users is important. You want control over who is going to be able to edit what.

Most CMS offer this possibility so it shouldn’t be that much of a problem, but certain CMS offer a much deeper level of control over what users are allowed to do. In the end, it all depends what you need to control.

6. Versioning

This feature is by far one of the most important feature to consider for your future CMS. Versioning will allow you to revert back to a previous version of a page or article and will avoid some huge headaches to your web team. Everybody make mistakes and you know someone if going to screw up one of your pages at one point, so why not consider this in your CMS choice?

Again, some CMS will allow you do go deeper and will allow you to restore not only pages and articles, but also other important aspects of your website like CSS.

7. Multiple website support

Nobody wants to install three CMS because three different websites live under the same root domain. Unfortunately, with certain CMS, you don’t have a choice and have to install multiple copies and maintain these copies separately. In fact, the painful process is not the installation, it’s the support afterwards and the upgrades. Multiple copies of the same CMS means you also have to replicate users, roles and permissions accross all your different installations. You don’t want that.

If you know you will be building different websites with different functionality under the same root domain (.com), then you need to consider a CMS that will allow you this with a single installation.

8. Painless upgrades

Running the latest version of a CMS is important as upgrades often include important security patches. Unfortunately, a lot of CMS make the upgrade process so painful that most people and businesses simply decide not to upgrade. I understand.

The solution really isn’t not to upgrade, the solution is to choose a CMS that will allow you painless upgrades. Certain CMS like Wordpress for instance will allow you to upgrade your installation with the click of a button. It is a bit more complex for some other CMS, but really what you’re looking for is an upgrade process that won’t screw your website for days everytime.

9. Open source and community support

Going with an open source solution versus a commercial solution is important to consider. A lot of Web businesses will try yo sell their in-house commercial CMS and it’s not necessarily a bad things, but keep in mind that it will probably cost more money the more you need specific features.

Going with an open source solution might cost you just as much money to customize the solution to your needs, but it will probably be cheaper in the long run as you will be able to benefit from third party plugins and modules. Open source solutions will also allow you to get free support from the community instead of having to pay 125$ an hour or more for a consultant.

Both options are good, it simply depends what your needs and budget are. If you want more freedom over what you’ll be able to do by yourself, an open source solution might be a better choice. Keep in mind that open source solutions will also allow you to test before “buying”, which might be impossible for commercial solutions

10. Plugins and modules

There is no perfect CMS with all the features you need and will need. But that’s not a problem, what’s important is that you can easily develop or install modules for the features you need. Not only it’s important to be able to install and develop modules, it’s also important to have a look at the existing database of plugins and modules available for your future CMS.

A mature CMS will have tons of modules and plugins already tested by other users and that can be a huge advantage over a new player in the CMS industry.

So that’s one more thing to make your decision even harder: if the CMS doesn’t have all the features you need, are there some great plugins available that you could use? Then again, this is assuming you are using an open source solution as the choice of plugins will probably be smaller for commercial solutions. On top of that, an open source solution will allow you to test before “buying”.

It’s been a while, I know. But it’s all for the best.

I’ve worked on a lot of things in the past couple of months (mostly offline) and one of those things is a new design/theme and image for this blog. So it’s here and now live, ready to receive your comments. I hope you’ll like, because I really do.

It’s more than a new design, it’s also a new focus and redefined priorities. With this new design, among many other things, I clarified the tagline and purpose of the blog. As you probably noticed, the new tagline is:

The web, what matters, common sense.

It’s very simple and straight forward. No big deal, just common sense. I came up with this tagline after thinking about what’s really important when it comes to web development and websites’ promotion. My conclusion was very simple:

I think most people completely lost the focus when it comes to building and promoting websites. At the end of the day, what’s really important? Is it to rank #1 on Google, to offer the best user interface, to have the best design or to have the best social media strategy?

In the end, what really matters is to build websites worth visiting. That’s it: the web, what matters, common sense.

That’ll be the new focus: through posts about seo, web development, social media, analytics, web business and design, we’ll try to figure out common principles behind great websites, worth visiting.

That’s about it, I wanted to keep this short and let you have a look around. Please let me know what you think in the comments!

I think Facebook did a great job with “pages” and what you can do with them is really interesting, particularly for brands. The sad thing is that most Facebook brands’ pages suck. Really.

They suck because they fail to understand the core concept of social media and that providing value is not an option. I’m just going to throw random stats here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if 95% of Facebook pages were just a boring copy of the brand’s/person’s RSS feed. Then, social interactions are mainly sales pitch or self-promotion.

I’m sorry, but I need more. I need more than an additional feed of your content: for that there’s RSS and email. I need social interactions and content that is not necessarily about your brand, but that still can be of interest to me.

So, if your Facebook page looks like a RSS feed and that your logo is all over the place, it might be time to re-think your strategy.

Probably a lot. I don’t follow spam accounts, but they do follow me thinking I might press the “follow” button and I guess it’s no different for you if you are a little active on twitter. I noticed a huge drop in followers this week and I checked a couple of twitter accounts using twittercounter.com to find out most accounts experienced the same drop: it was twitter cleaning the house. Thank god.

I asked myself: “What percentage of my followers are purely spam accounts”? If you consider that I lost 147 followers that day and that I show an average growth of about 30 followers a day, twitter probably killed around 180 accounts that were following me that day. It actually is 4% of my followers. Add on top of that the spammy accounts that weren’t removed because they were too new or things like that, we probably end up with a 5-7% (if not 10%) of followers being spammy.

There’s more spam

You know, we end up with 5-7% being purely spam accounts that were STILL following me, but there’s more to include in the equation. I probably get a dozen new followers each day that eventually end up unfollowing me because I’m not following back. I haven’t really looked at the numbers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if 20% of the new follower notifications I receive were spam. That’s how ridiculous it is.

I’ve been complaining about the spam on twitter since day one and things are only getting worst. But you know, it’s good to see twitter taking actions like that and killing accounts: they are actually doing something about it.

So, what percentage of your followers do you think are spam accounts?

I had to create a new gmail account yesterday for a project and was greeted with the following screen right after creating the new email address:

That’s right, big G was asking for my mobile phone number to verify the new email. I was kinda surprised honestly. You know, Google already has a lot of information on me and probably already have my mobile phone number somewhere, but I just feel it’s information I shouldn’t have to share for a free email address. Then, I asked myself: “Let’s say I don’t have a mobile phone, can I still create a gmail account?”.

No phone, ask a friend

The process is not flexible at all. If you don’t have a mobile phone, you’re screwed, ask a friend:

If you’d like to sign up for a Gmail address, you need to have a mobile phone that has text-messaging capabilities.
If you don’t have a phone, you may want to ask a friend if you can use his or her number to receive a code.

What’s going on big G?

We’re Google, of course we store your mobile number

Google will use your phone number to send an invitation code in a text message to your phone. In doing so, we store each phone number to make sure it is used to create a limited number of accounts.

Your number will also be associated with your account to avoid unnecessary future verifications for other Google services.  For more information, please review the Gmail Privacy Policy: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/privacy.html. In accordance with this policy, your number will never be sold or shared for marketing purposes without your permission, nor will we contact you using this number without your express permission.

Your country is not available, ask a friend

There are a number of countries and carriers for which we don’t provide service because of varying limitations. If possible, you may want to try a friend’s phone on another carrier.

Can it get less flexible?

I don’t think so. I mean, you have to admit the limitations and conditions are a little crazy for creating a free email address. But, if it happens to you and don’t want to give your phone number, go through the process again, you might not have to verify by SMS. That’s what happened to me: I just started over and everything went fine. So, I don’t know exactly what triggers this SMS verification process, but it’s annoying.

I was reading this article on Read Write Web about the fact that the traditional comment system is about to change. In fact, the post is about the new product by the people behind the popular comment system JS-Kit, currently installed on more than 600,000 websites. The new comment system, called Echo, actually aggregates conversations from twitter, friendfeed and a bunch of other social platforms to give a better idea of what’s being said about your content outside of your website. Because let’s face it, more and more people talk about your content outside of your website.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while honestly. The amount of comments I leave on other blogs have considerably dropped in the last couple of months, but it is not because of my lack of interest. In a certain way, I still comment: it’s just not formal and traditional comments. I retweet posts, I comment on them on twitter, friendfeed and Facebook and sometimes on  blogs directly. I still show my interest and give feedback, but just not in a traditional way.

In fact, I think the 2 lines comment is dead. You know, the classic “nice post, you rock!” comment. While it is extremely annoying on a blog, it is perfectly suited for twitter. On the opposite, the smart 10 lines comment won’t and will probably never die.

I think we’re about to see some important changes in the blogging world, but all for the best. Things have already changed a lot with all the different channels available to produce content, but in my opinion this is only the beginning.

How do you see this evolving?

I’ve never been a huge fan of posts with topics such as “top 15 tools to…”. You know, I’ve found some blogs that successfully made those lists useful, but I feel that the added value is usually very low. Sure they do well in the search engines and are easy to read and share on social media platforms, but I much prefer a good analysis instead of a list and here’s why.

I stumbled upon an article on Mashable that express my feeling about “list posts”: Twittermania: 140+ More Twitter Tools!

I understand the funny reference to twitter with the 140 tools, but what really is the added value of such posts? I highly respect Mashable, but they do post a lot of similar articles and they spread viraly and I’m sure you know a lot of other blogs doing so. It’s not an isolated case.

I mean, what is the benefit of listing 140 tools, do you really expect me to try all of them? Of course not. That’s why I want an analysis. It’s easy to break down this post into 10 other posts that could be called something like “10 twitter clients compared”. Now that’s a useful post. But more work.

I can’t take any action with 140 twitter tools listed in a post, but I can surely take action after reading a comparison of 10 twitter tools. I don’t want to know every tool that is available to me, I want to know the best tools and why.

That’s the same reason why companies are ready to pay a lot of money for experts’ advices: they don’t have time to evaluate every single solution, they simply pay someone to do the evaluation and give them the top 3 options in a nice report.

You know, there are reasons why lists are popular and you might like them, but I just prefer a good analysis.

It hit me tonight. Have you ever looked at all the content you’re creating and that you do not own?

I’m the biggest fan of “own your content”. Whenever I evaluate different technologies or solutions when it comes to content creation, I always ask myself: will I own that data? When I say “own my content”, I mean on my own server or at least I make sure I will be able to leave the service with the data I created.

It is so easy to spend half a day on twitter and Facebook building a brand and retweeting your friends, but these are services that could shut down tomorrow with all your data. Of course you would keep the brand you worked so hard to build and all your connections, but without a solid home (website) and a central place to access the content that made you so special, you’re screwed.

Don’t take me wrong here, social networks are useful tools for sure, but they are only tools: they shouldn’t replace your home (your website). Your brand has to go beyond the tools you use because the platforms can be replaced anytime.

What do you think?

The Web has definitely changed a lot of things in our life and I find it fascinating when it has a direct impact on the way I see things offline. Among many other things, it has dramatically changed my expectations as a customer in my everyday life.

As a customer buying online, you have to trust the website, product and company you’re buying from. As an e-commerce owner, when you’re doing business online, you can’t fail and you have to meet customer expectations or they’ll just go elsewhere. This “meeting customer expectations” thing goes from the moment the customer arrives on your website to the after sale customer service: every aspect is important. Companies have worked really hard to build a safe and interesting enough environment so that customers would buy online instead of offline and trust me, nobody wants to screw that. Then, customers became used to live chat customer service, digitally delivered products, fast email answers, etc. This is all good because as customers, we like quality products, delivered fast and on time with an awesome customer service. The Web was able to deliver that. In fact, it had to, otherwise people would have continued buying offline. E-commerce businesses won such a big war.

Social media has also helped to bring that brand-customer relationship to another level. More than ever, customers are close to the brands and products they love and can “interact” with them. It’s all about building trust.

Now, whenever I go to the restaurant or go shopping “offline”, I expect all of the above. I expect to be able to talk to someone when I need it, I expect to be able to ask all the questions I want when I want to, I don’t want to talk to someone who simply try to sell me stuff: I want to talk to someone who’s trying to help me, I expect the buying process to be smooth, I expect awesome customer service, I expect a positive experience all the way. I simply expect this offline because I can get it all online. If I can chat live with a customer service rep online, why would I wait 25 minutes in store for an available rep?

There is just so much offline businesses could learn from e-commerce. Offline businesses will always be around, but some will have to re-think the way they work in order to stay in business. That’s just how strong the Web is.

Honestly, I think saying “don’t write for search engines” is just as ridiculous as saying “write for search engines”. Both are bad ways of doing things. I prefer to say: don’t write for search engines, but think about it.

I’m all about building communities, authenticity and transparency, but why are we always putting social media efforts and SEO appart? Why do people say: “I don’t care about SEO, I prefer to spend time building a community”? Both can go together.

I would never advise someone to write an article solely for search engines, but why not think about the fact that Google, Yahoo and Bing will index your content? I mean, your content is going to get indexed anyway, so having search engines in mind when you write content isn’t a bad thing for extra visibility. Having search engines in mind doesn’t mean writing keywords stuffed articles, it just means paying extra attention to basic SEO.

Then you know what? You can still build that community and benefit from some search engine traffic.