If you are thinking of having a new website or to revamp your old website, the decision is no longer on whether to have a content management system, but which one to choose. A custom content management system to fit your particular business needs, might seem a good idea, but is it?
A Custom CMS is one that is specifically developed and tailored to meet your unique needs and requirements, it’s built from scratch or customised extensively from an existing CMS framework to align with specific workflows, to include features and design preferences.
Advantages of a Custom Content Management System
A custom CMS designed around your business and inline with your particular needs has several advantages that standard off the shelf systems don’t offer.
Tailored Functionality: A custom CMS can be designed to include only selected features, streamlining the content management process. Often it’s easier to code something from scratch than to search for ready made solutions that don’t work as required.
Scalability: It can be built with scalability in mind, but actually you don’t always know what the future holds, so further development often means more cost.
Integration: Custom CMS solutions can be integrated with other systems and tools used by the organization, including systems that have been built internally that have no off the shelf plugins.
Security: This is a definite advantage, a custom CMS can be designed with specific security measures in mind, and is often more difficult to hack into. Commonly used systems are more likely to be attacked.
User Experience: The user interface and user experience can be customised to align with the preferences and skill levels of the content creators and editors within the organization.
Disadvantages of a Custom CMS
Cost: building a custom content management system requires a significant investment of time and resources compared to using off-the-shelf CMS solutions. Organisations often choose to go the custom route when they have very specific requirements that cannot be met by existing CMS platforms, and when the benefits of customisation outweigh the drawbacks.
Time: whilst a WordPress CMS can be setup and launched within a few hours, a custom system requires a huge overhead, taking months and sometimes years for design, planning, coding, testing, changes etc.
Why We Recommend WordPress
WordPress is standard CMS that usually includes all of the advantages of a custom content management system, only that it’s much quicker to build and consequently, it’s much less expensive. Visit our main website at RubberDragon.com to see a completely different example of a WordPress website.
Notes.
If you’d like more information, see this interesting discussion and article on a coding competion, designed to answer which type of cms is best? The article includes a discussion on how to make the call on whether a client’s needs are best suited by a CMS, and whether the job needs a custom build, worth reading.