Choosing what route to take when developing your business’ website can be tricky, especially with the conflicting amounts of information out there. In general, there are two routes you can take when deciding what website platform would be best for your business: content management systems or custom-coded websites? In this article, we will explain both and give you a round-up of their pros and cons so that you can decide for yourself which one would suit best for your specific business. Content Management System Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress and Drupal offer pre-built graphical interfaces for you to build your website around and manage its content. Website developers are not needed, and it is very fast and effortless to build. Many CMS platforms offer different themes, however, the ability to customize is limited. Custom Coded Websites Custom Coded Websites are built from scratch, by website developers. The website can be customized and tailored by code to meet your customer’ wants and needs. What’s best for your business? • PERFORMANCE CMS doesn’t always perform as well as custom-coded websites. You may run the risk of losing a couple of seconds on web-page loading time. This is due to the fact that there are more dependencies on the plugins and content. Whereas, custom-coded websites load quicker as they have most content at hand and are ready to load immediately. • TIME CMS has pre-built existing themes. This dramatically reduces the time it takes to create and launch the website. You will save time and money using a CMS, but as mentioned before, may lose out on performance quality. • PREVIEW FUNCTION A very useful function that comes with CMS is the ability to preview content. You are able to view and save it as a draft before officially publishing it on the website. On custom-coded websites you can only preview the content by having a copy of the code and testing it on your computer. • ADAPTABILITY Due to the fact that custom-coded websites use code created from scratch, it’s much easier to alter and change the design and content of the website. This in turn can increase the longevity of your website and make it less likely to look out of date as time goes on. • TYPE OF BUSINESS A CMS is great for most sites as it is efficient and quick to make. However, if you have a business in a very niche market then it would be harder to find a CMS theme that would match your business. Thus, a custom-coded website would be more fitting. Deciding between CMS and custom-coded websites is a very common topic of discussion when starting a new web design project. It can be a challenging decision process, but we hope these points have sparked some reflective thoughts for you!
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