The first step is to know whether you want an e-commerce website or an informational website. Will you sell products directly online (e-commerce) or just advertise (information)? However, in this article we will only deal with the latter, but another article for eCommerce CMS is in the pipeline.
information page
Information pages have the special feature that you do not sell any service through them. They show the descriptions of your products and can help potential customers choose your services. However, this does not mean that SEO services are not important on these websites. SEO services are still essential as they are used to drive new customers to your website. You then need a CMS with a simple and fairly complete SEO implementation.
Based on these criteria, we have chosen two CMS: WordPress and Joomla
Below you will find the reasons for our selection
– User Support
– Number of available plugins, themes and modules
– Efficiency in relation to the task
– Users can change the content in a simple and straightforward way
– Security
– Support of the CMS and updates
WordPress
With more than 58 million websites, WordPress is the leading blog content management system on the web. With its huge user base and popularity, you can be sure that there will be updates for years to come. WordPress allows you to create a blog on its own website, but we advise against it as it would limit customization options, prevent you from monetizing your site and overall it wouldn’t be a good showcase for your business.
Although the CMS solution is designed for blog entries, it is more suitable for SMEs:
– Possibility to simply develop it further
– Blog posts leading to stronger onsite SEO
– Simple and elegant management interface
– Publish articles from anywhere via the mobile application
WordPress is a very easy to use and straightforward solution for people who don’t have any special technical knowledge; It allows the user to create polished blog posts with minimal effort.
It’s a powerful solution for informative websites and it’s easy to integrate new custom modules. A good integration gives you the ability to manage them from the admin panel and you have enough flexibility to define an SEO strategy.
However, WordPress also has its disadvantages:
– For large projects, WordPress is more complicated to customize than Joomla
– Slightly less secure than Joomla
– Fewer options out of the box than Joomla
Due to its extreme simplification, the power user will feel less comfortable with WordPress than with Joomla when it comes to changing advanced settings. WordPress also had some security issues, but the development team seems to have taken this issue into account in the last few versions.
Joomla
On the other side of the coin is Joomla. Estimating the number of websites using this solution is really complicated as no updated figures are really available. According to our sources, we can safely speak of more than 60 million.
Joomla is a well-known CMS system whose main strength lies in customization: the user can make anything he wants out of the platform. The advantages of this CMS are as follows:
– High customization options
– Full admin panel with multiple settings
– Complete modules available (shopping cart, download platform…)
– Relatively safe if updated regularly
– Large number of plugins/themes/modules
Joomla’s architecture is more open to change than WordPress’. Even if if modified too much the use of a CMS will be diminished as the website would be better developed from scratch.
Ironically, while Joomla’s high level of customization is its main strength, part of Joomla’s downsides are related to this feature:
– Administration panel can be very confusing
– The user interface is heavier compared to WordPress
– Menu customization cannot be accessed
– Some plugins do not work as expected
– Not SEO friendly “out of the box”
– Many plugins are chargeable
Joomla is hard, partly because of the choices that are given to the user. The amount of options in the admin panel is way too big. And a very disappointing point concerns SEO, which is not attractive out of the box. However, some plugins like Sh404SEF will do the job. Note that this plugin is not free and encountered some bugs while using it.
Verdict
Let’s put it this way, WordPress is going to do the work for 90 information websites, and it’s going to do it pretty well. It is more attractive than Joomla because of its simplicity and also because SEMs who want a more complex website should directly choose the ecommerce CMS or web application options according to their needs.
Obviously, Joomla can be more convenient in certain cases – for example, if you want to add a shopping cart to your existing Joomla site, you can do it for a small cost. Sticking with Joomla would then be cheaper than building a completely new website using a specialized CMS platform or a brand new web application.
