Off the shelf CMS or Web Agency developed package?

Making the decision over what Content Management System to use as the platform for your company’s website is not something to take lightly.  The problem every website owner has is finding a package which best fits their current needs but also can provide a stable and flexible solution to move forward with their business not just for the lifetime of the soon to be implemented design but also for years to come.

As your business grows and with it your website expands it’s content offering will become more diverse and you’ll want to be sure you can re-design and refresh your site without changing what’s under the hood.

Choosing a CMS for your project is an important decision

WordPress is OK, right?

There are plenty of freelancers and web companies out there who offer a CMS website when in fact they’re selling you something built on WordPress.  WordPress is not technically a CMS, it’s blogging software. This is great if you’re not using an agency to develop your website – your freelancer can rely on a multitude of plugins to achieve something close to your ideal website functionality.

The catch is that a website built on a collection of third party plugins is at risk of becoming more complicated instead of less so. But if your CMS is holding you back and a full-scale migration is not in the roadmap, a partial solution is better than none at all.

Get a tailored fit

But what about having something built especially for you to fit your business needs? Sure, agencies that offer this as a solution won’t be developing it from scratch but they will be using a tried and tested set of code which is flexible enough to adapt to suit your company requirements.

Taking a specific brief – just as you would give for design work – an agency will deploy their experienced developers to engineer a CMS application that does exactly what you want it to do.  There’s no mixture of plugins that are hacked together, no problems with ongoing support and most of all when you decide that you want to start integration into your in house stock control or CRM solution, they’ll have it covered.

Hack attacks

Hackers will target widely used CMS solutions because they’re more likely to get a better result and exploit more systems.  These attacks are called “Zero Day” exploits – meaning hackers can quickly target plenty of vulnerable sites before the owners get a chance to patch them – something that WordPress users often suffer from.  Many WordPress site owners assume that your hosting company will automatically upgrade you to a new version – this is rarely the case and so what started off as a hassle free CMS is now something that you need to constantly monitor and patch yourself!

In Summary

As an agency ourselves we’ve worked with many companies who have started off with their websites being built on open source platforms such as WordPress, Joomla, Magento etc.  Each and every time they have come to us to have their site either rebuilt or migrated to a simpler platform.  Our Paprika CMS solution is purposely straight forward to use yet flexible and adaptable to business requirments as your company evolves.  The best part is you and your staff will find it easy to use, saving you time and money.