Which CMS Should Use?
-
I have a desinger working on a new webiste and he's suggesting that WP creates design limitations (He's doing quite a bit of HTML 5 I believe...I'm not sure) and obviosly has secruity concerns.
He suggested TextPattern, which I've never heard of. Has anyone had any experience with it?
Also, what CMS are you using (besides WP) that you really like and is SEO friendly?
Thanks
-
We have sites built in Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and also custom built CMS's.
All of these are search engine friendly. Wordpress in particular has a number of excellent SEO guidance tools to put you on the right track.
The consensus of opinion from the comments given is that you need to question your web developer's opinions. Making the wrong choices now will only land you in hot water in the future.
Good luck with your project
-
The CMS should be up to the designer to use - obviously you as a client should make sure that there is a good product delivery and that the back-end meets your expectations.
I would agree with your Developer that WordPress is very limiting. Whilst good for Blogs and News-oriented websites it was not built to cater for other websites. CMS like TextPattern or Symphony allow much better control on the structure and output, allowing for better dissection re-use of code and potentially better SEO. I've been using Symphony for over 2 years and I've found it brilliant - I can control and make small SEO tasks much simpler, as I structure the data the way I would like it, rather the standard way the CMS thinks is correct.
Note that SEO has nothing to do with the CMS itself, its more about the implementation as done by your developer. Whilst WordPress has some plugins to make this easier it is not necessarily the only and best way.
-
I really can't sing Wordpress praises highly enough. By far it has given me and my clients the best results from an SEO perspective, as well as allowing even the most basic of users to add and update content. In terms of security, I recommend Sucuri.net which will monitor and fix any hack/virus/malware etc and they provide great advice and support to keep your WP install secure.
-
textpattern was all the rave couple of years ago with easy to use templating Designers were free to achieve various looks and designs with html and no php when wordpress was not know for it flexibility beyond blogging platform. Those were early days of wordpress when it was first ported from b2. since than thanks to open source wp community wordpress and many other far eclipsed textpattern and those benefits that text pattern initially offered. Many will tell you chose a cms per project basis as many are good at one thing while not at other but i will say that with joomla and wordpress and their most valuable asset their ecosistem of devs and plugins you will be hard pressed to find a typensite that you cannot build with these top 2 free cms platforms...
sorry for typos hate typing on my pad
-
Wordpress for me. There's a great theme designed specifically for customization (weaver), blank themes with no CSS whatsoever so you have total control and the updates/bug fixes and support are consistent. Joomla is sluggish, even with cache modules and Drupal, which I really wanted to like, is downright annoying. I've had a support question in their forum for 3 months now with no response.
-
I'm a huge fan of MODX. Integrating custom design is very easy to learn and the community rocks. You have 100% control over all markup output. No "theming" structure to learn like most CMSs.
-
I think you might want to consider finding a new designer / developer Creating this type of visual is not a problem in wordpress. It may jsut be that your designer si nto overly confident with wordprss customisations so maybe you need to look for someone who is? I don't have any experience with textpattern, but wordpress could certainly create this type of visual. By the looks if it this is just an ordered list with some CSS styling.
I would certainly recommend go wth wordpress over textpattern for maintainability - if your designer can't continue to support your website for any reason getting someone with textpattern knowledge is going to be much harder than wordpress, plus wordpress has all of the cool SEO plugins that ahve already been discussed by others.
-
I've heard of textpattern but never really used it. It's WP all the way for me. You can chop it and change it to fit your needs and the fact that there is so much support out there when you hit a brick wall there's always someone who can help.
-
If you like at this site and scroll a little beneath the fold you'll see a visual representation of the business process. I asked for a similar visual but the desinger mentioned he wasn't sure if he could do it in WordPress. What do you think?
-
The site's going to be used for an SEO consultany.
-
Excellent Point.
-
Hi Spencer, I only have experieince with 2 CMS's. I was an early adopter of Word Press so I wouldn't know my way iaround n it at all anymore as it's changed so much. I currently use Joomla 1.5 . It's relatively SE friendly, but then again so is WP theses days (so I've heard) I've also heard the current WP is much easier to customise than the older versions.
What is the purpose of your website going to be? (eg. blog, ecommerce, etc.)
-
Hi Spencer,
I am a huge proponent of WordPress, and it is (in my opinion) the best SEO CMS available. For starters there are excellent Plugins such as HeadSpace2, and the All-In-One-SEO-Pack, which allow you to manage title tags, meta data, redirects, ect.
WordPress also has other excellent plugins for SEO including SEO Friendly Images, and SEO Tag Cloud. Also, WordPress has awesome sharing widgets such as Sexy Bookmarks.
So in conculsion any design limitations are far outweighed by the overwhelming amount of SEO and sharing widgets available. The real limitations for WordPress is not in the design department it is in the Intranet department. However, if having an intranet is not important then I would say WordPress all the way.
C
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does a similar CMS fabric/theme used by 2 colleagues, cause SEO issues?
Does using the same CMS fabric/theme with substantially different content for each website but the same business address (on google places and the websites) cause SEO issues? For example: 2 colleagues with somewhat similar services located at the same business addresses desire to use the same CMS fabric /theme but will have different content on the sites. Will this hurt their SEO / should they use a different website skin/theme?
Web Design | | toti5880 -
Is it against google guidelines to use third party review sites as well as have reviews on my site marked up with schema?
So, i look after a site for my family business. We have teamed up with the third party site TrustPilot because we like the way it enables us to send out reviews to our customers directly from our system. It's been going great and some of the reviews have been brilliant. I have used a couple of these reviews on our site and marked them up with: REVIEW CONTENT We work in the service industry and so one of the problems we have found is that getting our customers to actually go online and leave a review. They normally just leave their comments on a job sheet that the workers have signed when they leave. So I have created a page on our site where we post some of the reviews the guys receive too. I have used the following: REVIEW TITLE REVIEW Written by: CUSTOMER NAME Type of Service:House Removal Date published: DATE PUBLISHED 10 / 10 stars I was just wondering I was told that this could be against googles guidelines and as i've seen a bit of a drop in our rankings in the last week or so i'm a little concerned. Is this getting me penalised? Should I not use my reviews referencing the ones on trust pilot and should i not have my own reviews page with rich snippets?
Web Design | | BearPaw881 -
Best CMS for e-commerce
Our website is powered through Magento CMS although I am losing my patience with it. We are completely restricted as to what we can do. The development costs are high and ongoing. We are a fast moving company but we feel that Magento is not the right solution for the companies future. We can not style pages to drive conversions without putting styling requests to our developers which takes months to complete and the end results are not always as we would prefer, we would prefer to style the pages ourselves using blocks etc. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
Web Design | | Jseddon920 -
Using a query string for linked, static landing pages - is this good practice?
My company has a page with links for each of our dozen office locations as well as a clickable map. These offices are also linked in the footer of every page along with their phone number. When one of these links is clicked, the visitor is directed to a static page with a picture of the office, contact information, a short description, and some other information. The URL for these pages is displayed as something like http:/example.com/offices.htm?office_id=123456, with seemingly random ID numbers at the end depending on the office that remain static. I know first off that this is probably bad SEO practice, as the URL should be something like htttp://example.com/offices/springfield/ My question is, why is there a question mark in the page URL? I understand that it represents a query string, but I'm not sure why it's there to begin with. A search query should not required if they are just static landing pages, correct?. Is there any reason at all why they would be queries? Is this an issue that needs to be addressed or does it have little to no impact on SEO?
Web Design | | BD690 -
Nav / Sitemap Question. Using a "services" page vs just linking directly to individual service page?
Okay, so our company offers video production, web design, and web marketing services. While we do offer these services individually, our goal is to get our clients to integrate these services together. Our nav is currently like so : home - about - video - web design - web marketing - blog - contact Now I've seen businesses and agencies also use a nav with a "services" button instead of listing out their service offerings (if they have more than 1, like us). The services button usually links to a category page or has a drop down with links to the company's individual services. I'm wondering if there is any benefit to having a main services page like this and linking to the individual pages off of it (video ,web design, marketing, etc). Or if we should just keep it the way we have it now (since we've already got some page authority on the individual service pages). I know this may not be the most important aspect of our site and we may be over-thinking it but any thoughts/ideas would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
Web Design | | RenderPerfect0 -
Basekit.com anybody using it?
I need help to built a mulitlanguage website. After posting questions, I most admit Wordpress with a premium template might be the options for all the features I need. Thoses are: SEO Frendly (custom links...html...Alt Tag...Metadata...)
Web Design | | BigBlaze205
Mobile Version
Great Template
Multilanguage Complete web site
Google Analytics
Blog
301 redirect Some one suggest basekit.com Do you thing it might be my solution? Thank you for your help. BigBlaze0 -
Using "#" anchors to display different content
If I have a page that has an area on the page that acts like a widget and has three different tabs. These tabs provide 3 different types of information relevant to the page subject matter. By default when someone goes to the page one of the tabs is showing but you have to click on the others to see the info on them. Is it OK to use domain.com/topic#TAB1, domain.com/topic#TAB2, domain.com/topic#TAB3 to create shortcut links so that people can land on the page and have that predetermined tab showing. I'm wondering what search engines might think. Essentially all the content of all three tabs is there for people to see but they'd have to click to see the other tabs. I don't consider the content to be hidden. But I'd like to hear people's thoughts.
Web Design | | Business.com0 -
Using Wordpress as CMS for large Websites
Is Wordpress good enough to be used as a full fledge CMS for a large website. In particular, I'm talking about a news website. We have been online since 2002 but pretty soon we will have digitized our print newspaper archives of about 60 years. So, my question is, is it OK to use Wordpress for the entire website and if so what are some of the important things that need to be kept in mind. Cheers!
Web Design | | RishadShaikh590