Today, almost every business needs to use online resources to grow its customer base and win bran recognition. Content management systems, or CMS, can be a great tool to create and manage websites with minimal to no coding skills. If your business thrives on e-commerce, then chances are you already make use of a CMS like WordPress, Shopify, etc. However, if you are looking to take your business’s online presence a step further, customizing your CMS may take your page visits and online sales to new heights.
What is CMS?
CMS is a platform that lets you customize your business website according to your needs. However, unlike web development, creating a fully personalized website using CMS requires minimal to no coding skills. Over half of business websites use CMS in their building-process. It requires minimal technical skills to use, little maintenance, and if you need modifications, they can easily add them using an administrator dashboard.
Who Needs Custom CMS?
As mentioned above, CMS allows business owners to host their websites with minimal technical skills. Although this might be a boon for new business ventures, your functional requirements personalizations might not match what the CMS has to offer. In this scenario, you might customize your CMS according to your unique taste or build a custom CMS from scratch. Customizing CMS can be extremely beneficial for growing businesses to fill the gaps in their existing CMS platform.
Semi-custom CMS
Opting for developing a fully customized CMS from the ground up may be unnecessary for your business. If there are only a few additional functions you wish your original CMS included, hiring a software technology development company to customize your existing CMS to your business’s needs may be your best bet.
Here are some of the most common CMS platforms that you can start with and work with a professional developer to customize or optimize for your purposes:
- WordPress- WordPress is undoubtedly the most popular CMS platform, with more than 30 percent of businesses using this CMS. Although an already streamlined platform, it can further be customized to be more secure, bug-free, and with more personalization options. WordPress is a reliable platform for most business ventures.
- Magento eCommerce- This is another CMS platform that is a popular choice for online e-commerce websites. Magneto features extensions you can customize according to your tastes and business needs to facilitate better brand visibility and market exposure.
- Demandware Commerce Cloud- Bought by Salesforce in 2016, Demandware provides a cloud-based e-commerce website hosting service with AI and mobile computing facilities. You can further customize those same AI and mobile computing to create the optimal cloud-based business venture.
- Drupal CMS- Drupal is another popular open-source CMS platform with a broad audience of growing businesses. It has tremendous flexibility to further website growth in the future because it allows high customizability. Approximately 2.5 percent of all CMS-dependent websites use Drupal.
If you do choose the semi-custom CMS route, you do want to keep in mind that drastically changing your existing CMS base code to suit your needs might render it incompatible for further updates, if and when they occur. For this reason, you may be better off with a completely customized tool.
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Advantages of Using a Custom CMS
While working with a developer can help you make the most of an existing CMS platform, some businesses require more sophistication and customization. If you want full creative freedom and functional control of your content management tool, then hiring a developer to create a completely custom CMS may be most effective for you. Additional benefits of using a custom CMS include:
- Security- Depending on your information security needs, you can make your CMS platform much more secure than websites running on open-source CMS.
- Updates and Maintenance- Working with a developer on custom CMS ensures that your website is always updated and maintained according to your ever-evolving business needs.
Disadvantages of Using a Custom CMS
Although a custom CMS might seem like what your business might need, it brings with it some inherent disadvantages:
- Technical Requirements- Customizing a CMS platform requires coding skills, so you may have to hire outside help.
- Expensive- In addition to using a CMS, customizing the same, and maintaining a personalized CMS can be much more costly in the long run.
A Custom CMS Could Be Just What Your Business Needs To Grow
If you are a small business venture and would like to grow further but feel like your online presence is hindered by your CMS’s limitations, opting for a customized CMS might be precisely what your business needs. With tailor-made personalization options, data analytics services, and improved security measures, bespoke CMS can help bolster your online presence and create a stronghold for your business to grow.