Why CMS Isn’t For You?

CMS is considered as the best solution for rapid website development. It is practical and much preferred method of creating fully-featured, visually appealing websites quickly. However, despite their immense benefits, there are times when CMS platforms don’t really fit the bill. In terms of exposure, WordPress, Drupal and Joomla continue to grow. Some people have turned to CMS and they end up becoming somewhat disappointed due to a number of reasons.

It is true that CMS is easy to install, but it is not always true. For older websites that don’t have CPanel as its management interface, even installing WordPress can take time and effort. This will require some knowledge and skill. Installing CMS manually is necessary when our web host doesn’t provide Fantastico as a quick way to install various website platforms.

Many webmasters still don’t have any idea how CMS works, because they are still get used to older platforms, such as ASP and plain PHP. The problem could also become quite challenging, when the website already has thousands of pages and none of the content is stored in database. Each page is still based on HTML and CSS. This will require webmasters to manually re-post each page in the CMS. It would be a tedious task and may take months to complete.

For some people, adding content with CMS can be quite challenging, especially if they are not used to the already intuitive WYSIWYG. Using CMS is about making compromises and accepting certain limitations that it has. We need to accept the CMS platform as it is. For free, open source CMS, it is possible to make huge changes, but it will take plenty of time.

For larger website, migrating to CMS can be quite difficult. The problem can be even more complicated if we want to have unique and specific features that are not available in the website. With CMS, it is not always possible to find features that perfectly match our requirements. Although there could be thousands of plugins and widgets out there, a few highly customized implementations may not be available in the market.

Consequently, websites that have been modified continuously for many years could grow like a real organism. It already has so many specialized features that are built specifically for specific purposes. None of them can be replaced with available plugins and rewriting all the codes can be difficult, especially if the website isn’t based on PHP. This is especially true for comprehensive and complex websites that are based on JSP or ASP. In this case, it is probably better for them to keep using the old platform and avoid migrating to CMS.

Websites that have only less than ten pages and there are no plan to add more content in the future can keep their old platform. It doesn’t make any sense migrating to CMS, if there’s very little content and the website owner doesn’t plan to add new content.