Selecting a website platform is something you may need to consider when planning to launch an effective website. A platform is just another name for the underlying technology that powers the website. You may hear the term CMS, which is an acronym for Content Management System.
Today, many websites use a CMS to better manage the different aspects of a website – content, design, and functionality.
The greatest benefit of a CMS is that it enables business owners to easily make updates to their website content. Most CMSes today also have blog posting capability so the same functionality is used to create and edit blog postings as well.
Popular Content Management Systems
You’ll need to make some decisions or receive some guidance on the technologies that you plan to use as the underlying platform for your website. I’m a big proponent of open source technologies so I always recommend using a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack because there are minimal software costs and you can inexpensively scale the underlying hardware resources. The alternative is using a Microsoft stack, but you’ll quickly have to start paying for software and the ability to scale is limited due to expense.
For a LAMP stack, three popular CMSes are:
Each one has specific features and benefits, and they are all readily available at the major hosting companies. The main features that are common to all three are:
- Web page / content management
- Selection of available design themes
- Numerous plugins that extend the functionality of the core platform
A comparison of the three platforms will help you determine which one best meets your business needs depending on how much you plan to do yourself and how much you plan to allocate to a designer or developer.
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