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”.

There’s of course a balance

You can’t just generate a million pages and wait for the traffic, it’s like anything else, you have to find a balance between quality and quantity. I’m sure you’ve figured by now that when I say I generated a lot of content, I didn’t generate that content manually. Not generating the content manually means getting the content automatically from rss feeds or similar sources. That being said, it’s easy to just get yourself a million of articles through RSS feeds and get them indexed in Google, but the truth is that like anything else, you have to be smart. Remember that you still need backlinks to get a good ranking in Google, and those backlinks are extremely hard to get with a crappy website. It’s where playing smart comes into play, because you have to find a way to generate thousands of pages, without your website looking too much automated.

How to generate content from feeds

The most popular method to generate content is to get your content from RSS feeds. I won’t go exactly into details as everybody use a different platform for their website. You can generate content automatically for a wordpress blog, a drupal CMS or a pligg site for example. You can do a little search for your platform and I’m sure you will find some interesting plugin. If you are into Wordpress, you might want to have a look at an interesting WP plugin called wp-o-matic. It let’s you generate content automatically from RSS feeds for your Wordpress blog and it’s pretty good for a free plugin.

Isn’t it bad?

I know, I know, you like quality. I do also like quality. I just think part of making money online is trying a lot of things and getting some money from everywhere you can. I’m not building my future on automated websites, it’s just a nice addition to my collection of websites and it’s bringing in some money. You can make your site totally useless by generating content automatically, so that’s why I’m saying you have to be smart when doing it. If you are going to automate a website, make it look good and still useful to people. That’s what I did and after 2 months, it’s driving around 500 uniques daily and it’s going up every week. I think it’s great for a 2 months old website and it is 100% passive income.

Don’t be evil

Remember, don’t be evil! I know you guys will look around for an automated website possibility. I don’t usually talk about these things because I don’t like it, but I found out that if done correctly, it can be useful for you and your users. Don’t think about starting a finance blog and just generating posts without doing nothing, you have to think a little further than that to have a platform that can drive good traffic. The lesson is that automated websites work if you’re not too evil!