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If you want to build an online presence for your brand, you need to have great online content. If you don’t, you won’t be able to keep up with the ever-growing competition and your business won’t have any chance of succeeding.
You always need to remember that digital marketing plays a pivotal role in the world of online business, and it definitely shouldn’t be taken lightly.
To create quality and engaging content, you need a reliable content management system (CMS). A CMS is a software tool that allows you to publish and manage content on the internet. The biggest advantage of a CMS is that it lets users manage content without too much coding knowledge required.
There are a lot of CMS options to choose from, so it could be rather tricky to choose the right one. All of them will do the same thing – help you create and manage your content – but some do the job better than others. If you want your website to succeed, you need to choose the right CMS.
How to choose a CMS?
When choosing a CMS, you will notice that some of them offer different features. There are features which are essential, but there are also those which you may never use.
A good CMS should include the following features:
- Strong community. When a CMS has an active community that is always willing to help, you can be sure that the website you are managing will be up to date. Constant updates, help from a knowledgeable support team, and security patches will be of great importance.
- Easy publishing process. When you have the ability to work with a lot of options, that will make creating new content easy. With just a little effort, your website will look professional. A powerful editor is a necessity in this case.
- Page editing functionality. It’s not enough to have quality content, your website will also need to have various types of pages. With the right CMS, you will have all the required tools to customize your pages.
- Content organization options. If a website isn’t organized properly, it doesn’t matter how good content it has. With the right CMS, you will be able to categorize, organize, and assign tags, making everything much clearer.
- High level of customizability. When your CMS platform is customizable, it will be easy for you to add any features you want and make your website unique.
Top 5 CMS Tools
There’s no need to go through every CMS tool you can find just to see if it has all the required features. Below are the five tools which are the best choice for 2019. Any one of them will help you create websites that have engaging content and will attract a lot of traffic.
WordPress
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There is a good chance that you’ve already heard of WordPress as it’s the most popular CMS tool. According to statistics, 400 million people visit WordPress websites each month, and 60% of CMS-built websites were created with WordPress
WordPress has grown significantly since its early days when it was just a blogging platform. This platform is easy to use and it offers thousands of themes as well as free and premium plugins for you to choose from.
Content management is a breeze with WordPress. Publishing new pages and posts is done effortlessly, and thanks to its powerful editor, you can format your content to your liking. The platform has a community that is always willing to help with any issue, it gets updated regularly, and it supports user registration.
The software has such a large user community because it is open source, with a lot of plugins, widgets, and multipurpose themes. This makes it perfect for anyone who wants to create a professional-looking website or blog without too much effort.
No matter what kind of website you’ve imagined, you can probably make an even better one with WordPress. These are some of the best features WordPress has to offer:
- quick and easy installation and setup
- simple plugin integration
- intuitive user interface
- powerful editor
- great customization options
Drupal
Even though Drupal isn’t as popular as WordPress, it’s still one of the best open-source CMSs and has built an impressive community. It was first developed as a student community solution before becoming a full-fledged open-source CMS.
While most sites with low and medium traffic use WordPress, Drupal is usually used by high-traffic websites (such as Instagram).
With Drupal, you will have extensive opportunities for customization thanks to its modular layout. Drupal sets its focus mostly on social publishing, and that’s why it’s excellent for small and medium-sized community projects.
You can create a blog, an internet forum, or even a community platform with the core modules Drupal has to offer. There are many modules to choose from, but the downside of this is that all functions have to be installed manually, which can be rather time-consuming.
This software’s interface allows you to create and publish content with ease, and its tools are easy to use but still very powerful. You can also edit your website on the front end, and the program will save each version after you’ve made alterations to your content.
Drupal is considered to be one of the safest and most secure platforms when it comes to open-source CMS. This is thanks to its large open-source community, which creates the software, provides support, and writes the documentation.
Joomla
WordPress might be the most popular and widely used CMS, but Joomla comes in second. It has been downloaded over 97 million times, with more than 2.5 million websites using it. The software can be used by both experts and beginners, but it is more difficult to master than WordPress, so some may find it challenging.
Joomla is characterized by an object-oriented software design, which means that users will be able to write their own extensions.
There are three types of extensions in Joomla:
- plugins
- components
- modules
The disadvantages of these extensions are that they can be used both on the backend and frontend, which can be somewhat confusing. Also, the extensions are not always free and can be quite pricey.
However, Joomla is great for those who want to run a website which isn’t solely based on text content because it allows you to manage a lot of custom post types.
Another benefit of Joomla is that it offers multilingual support. That means that you don’t need extensions or plugins to add more languages. Finally, with Joomla, you can use multiple themes or templates at the same time to frame different types of content.
Typo3
The previous CMS platforms are the top three when it comes to popularity and the number of users, while Typo3 is a lesser-known platform. However, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a good one.
The best thing about Typo3 is that it caters to enterprise-level websites. It is constantly updated by a team of experienced developers, so it’s always up to date. It really has a lot to offer, especially to eCommerce platforms and large corporate portals.
Typo3 offers a large spectrum of functions that you can use for a variety of projects. This is great for those who are running larger-scale websites. However, the implementation and administration could be complicated for beginners, so it’s not too suited for small websites.
Another good feature Typo3 offers is multilingual support, which makes it easy to translate content, as it doesn’t require an additional plugin. This is especially important for larger websites as they could greatly benefit from translating their content into multiple languages.
Some other key features this platform offers are the option to manage multiple sites from one installation, and it also allows sharing tools and data among your websites.
Adobe DreamWeaver
Finally, there is an alternative for those who don’t necessarily want to build a website with a CMS platform. Adobe DreamWeaver allows you to code your own website without too much programming knowledge.
DreamWeaver works by combining a WYSIWYG editor with a high-performance coding engine. Because of this, developers can install functions such as automatic code integration with very little work.
Instead of using readymade extensions, you code your own website design. Even though it might take some time to learn the essentials, this is a fantastic feature for those who want to design a website exactly to their liking.
More advanced users can make an amazing website because DreamWeaver has multi-monitor support for Windows, support for the Chromium Embedded Frameworks, as well as CSS grids.
In addition, the software supports the following coding languages:
- Java
- JavaScript
- PHP
- ASP
- CSS preprocessors (Sass, Less, SCSS)
Essentially, Adobe DreamWeaver is a great software tool with an extensive range of functions and possibilities. However, it’s used primarily by professionals. Beginners would have a much harder time with it, especially if they’ve never come across programming before.