Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

I’ve been seeing a number of these being released recently and as I am constantly trying to make my life easier, as well as my clients, I thought I’d put together a few of these for others to use as they see fit. I’m going to give CushyCMS a shot with a small client of mine and I’ll post some feedback after I’ve implemented that. The others I’ve yet to try Sitemasher, but the rest of them I have either some direct experience or anecdotal.

CushyCMS
I heard about CushyCMS a long time ago via TechCrunch. This is a really easy to implement CMS in that you just have to provide FTP access and add some CSS information into your website and CushyCMS provides a front end for you to manage your website. It also allows for the creation of roles so that you can give a login to your client and they can only change the appropriate areas of the website – not the backend code. Like I said, I’m going to try this out pretty soon and I’ll let you know how it goes.

Sitemasher
Sitemasher is way more robust than CushyCMS in that it provides a more in terms of user interface, version control, database integration, and search analytics. It’s not as free as Cushy either. It’s $99/month on the cheap end, but if you are in the market for a piece of software that provides some online functionality where you can manage your content from anywhere, as well as all the functionality I listed above, check this one out.

Wordpress.com
A lot of people know they can use Wordpress as a blogging platform, but really it’s just as easily transformed into a content management system. There’s already a number of people that are doing this. If you’re not that technically savvy, I’d suggest sticking with Wordpress.com as they update the software whenever a new release occurs. if you’re a little more tech savvy or want to keep things under your own control, you can go to Wordpress.org and download the latest version. Keep in mind though that this means you have to manage the database, software installation, and future upgrades yourself, but really it’s not THAT daunting – I promise.

There’s tons of other CMS platforms out there: Drupal, Joomla, DotNetNuke, Sava (if you’re into Coldfusion) and so many more. What I’d recommend when selecting one is decide what your technical expertise level is and how much time you have to devote to learning a new piece of software. If you need something quick and easy and don’t have a lot of technical expertise, choose one of the online versions I mentioned above. If you do have some time to learn new software and how to integrate them with database backends, choose one of the CMS’s I mentioned at the end of this article, or talk with your friends or colleagues and see what experiences they’ve had with any of these and what they like and dislike about each.

Shoot me an email if you have any other questions, or drop a comment below and I’ll get back to you.