4 mistakes to avoid when choosing a CMS platform

You might do all your homework and still end up making a mistake when choosing your CMS.

Some common mistakes I regularly see businesses make are:

1. Confusing “feature bloat” for “feature rich”

A “feature rich” CMS has features you and your team actually cares about.

A “feature bloat” CMS has tons of features with very little actual use.

2. Choosing a complex and costly CMS for future needs

It’s not uncommon for businesses to select a CMS based on unrealistic growth expectations. They might end up choosing a complex and costly CMS just because they anticipate accelerated growth “in the future”.

While it’s important to plan ahead, it is even more important to make sure that your CMS fulfills your existing needs. If a CMS has complicated features that won’t be of any use until you have, say, 100,000 pages, it might be wise to choose something simpler.

SaaS platforms allow you to “evolve” as your needs change. Starting with something for your current needs and then adding features as you become more comfortable and your customer expectations increase.

This is a tough balancing act, but making this mistake can cost you thousands of dollars while impacting your current work.

3. Choosing features over ease-of-use

Ease-of-use is often overlooked in the CMS decision-making process. Sure, features are important, but what good are they if no one can use them?

This mistake is often a result of IT and not end-users making the CMS decision. What might be intuitive to one department might be completely alien to another.

With SaaS platforms, extensive testing and user feedback provide continuous improvement to the user interface and the functionality. When considering a SaaS platform you can engage with their demonstration environments and know exactly what you’re purchasing

Having to lock yourself into a development environment and the functionality before you have had a chance to understand the relevance of the functionality is where considerable time and budget is lost. Reworking and reconstructing features and interfaces don’t add value to the project

4. Not understanding your content management problems

Before you even go into the market to choose a CMS, ask yourself: do you fully understand your own content management problems?

It’s not surprising for businesses to often want a new CMS without fully understanding the why.

If you have an existing CMS solution, ask yourself:

• Do you really need an alternative?
• Can you modify your existing solution to accommodate your new requirements?

In case you’re not using a CMS, ask yourself:

• Will a CMS offer a significant productivity boost compared to your current methods?
• Will your productivity gains be substantial enough to justify CMS costs?
• Will you grow fast enough in the next few years to demand a CMS?

This will give you A much-needed clarity for making a better decision.