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Here’s a quick question. If you had a spare $20 million floating about would you blow it all on a CMS for your website? Most of us with that kind of money would probably not even consider working any more and the nearest we’d get to a business website is browsing on an iPad from the sunny deck of a yacht anchored just off the Bahamas.

Of course, most of us would not be running, at that point, a $100 million dollar business. Business Week (which is now apparently bust) did have a $100 million business. That however does not explain how they decided to blow such serious cash on what is, basically, a CMS no different to that which WDS runs on.

A content management system (CMS), these days, is a robust, administrative platform which allows non-technical users the capability to edit the content of their website using a WYSIWYG interface as opposed to having to deal with the complications of FTP for content upload and the complexities involved with layouts at code designer level.

At WDS, every website we create is based on a flexible, powerful CMS which gives you total control of your website. Luckily it also costs nowhere near the $20 million mark. As a matter of fact one of the reasons we have clients in over 19 different countries is the fact that we deliver powerful, flexible technology and data-tested design (we employ online focus groups to assess their effectiveness) at affordable prices.

Affordability of platforms to digitally work from is one of the basic tenets of a good business. It tends to keep start-up costs low and any on-going maintenance or development, reasonable. If you are in the market for a website which fulfils the requirements of your business there is a checklist you should be aware of.

Website Content Management System Checklist

If you are getting a website ran on a content management system (CMS) here’s a handy checklist you need to go through in order to make sure you are getting the best deal possible:

• Is it a proprietary system? Proprietary systems are buggy, more expensive to run, harder to operate and tend to come with a limited shelf life. As soon as web programming evolves past a certain point (and it evolves all the time) the system will have to be scrapped and a new one put in place.

• Is it secure enough? Web security is a nightmare. If regular updates are not put in place your website will soon resemble Swiss cheese from a security point of view.

• Is there sufficient programming support? If you rely only on a single provider for your support you are tied to them forever. In a perfect world that is not a problem, but even the best of business relationships sometimes go south and being able to go elsewhere is one of the flexibilities non-proprietary CMS systems give.

• How about on-going support? Having a CMS allows you to run a complex website yourself with relative ease. But even then you may need some help with optimisation (SEO), design and programming. Proprietary systems tend to have unique programming which makes all of this difficult to outsource and a lot more expensive.

• What’s the cost? This is probably the question BusinessWeek should have led with. A proprietary system has a price tag well in the four figures (in most cases). Non-proprietary, open-source CMS systems are a lot lower in cost which makes the whole idea of a start up business, a lot more attractive.

Now, had BusinessWeek gone through this list before they parted with their $20 mill they may not have gone bust. The fact they didn’t does not mean you should repeat their mistake.

For competitive quotes and flexible payment options (pending project review) get in touch with us. Oh, and in case you are wondering what a $20 million site looks like here’s a screen capture of the BusinessWeek website, while it’s still around: