One of the first things you need to think about when setting up your own site is which platform it should run on. You can always have something custom-coded, or just use plain old HTML, but here we’ll go over what to think about and some possible solutions. CMS stands for Content Management System, and does what it says on the tin. If you’re planning to have an admin area to your site, where you log in to make changes, this is a CMS.

How do I know whether or not I need a CMS?

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Do I plan to blog on the site?
• Do I need the ability to change site content/images easily, without messing around in code?
• Am I using this site to sell items?
• Do I plan to expand the site in future, with new pages/sections?

If the answer to any of these is “yes”, then a plain HTML site is unlikely to work for you. A CMS (I’m counting eCommerce platforms in with these) can take some learning if you’re completely new to the idea, but a lot less than learning to change your site’s code yourself.

If you answered “no” to all of the above, and your site is strictly informative rather than constantly updated, you may be better off sticking to HTML/CSS as templates for this tend to be cheaper. You can always use a CMS in this situation too of course, just in case it’s needed for future expansion.

In both of the following scenarios you have a choice between free open source, or paid platforms. While paid options often come with better support, a lot of the time free options are actually the best. “Open source” basically means that anyone is free to use, add to or change the code, and this results in legions of coders all contributing to the project. You’ll often find hundreds of addons for your chosen open source CMS from authors all over the world, allowing you to pick and choose what you need and tailor your site to your needs. These same supporters form communities where new users can go for help.

Since we’re trying to get you off the ground cheaply, we’ll concentrate on these free options for the purposes of this article.

I do not plan to sell through my site, what are my options?

WordPress

Probably the most popular and beginner-friendly CMS is WordPress. Starting life as a simple blogging platform, WP has since evolved into a flexible solution for many small-to-medium websites with and without blogs. Its admin panel is very simple, and  from experience new users learn the ropes pretty quickly. It’s also very quick and simple to install, with the right theme you can be up and running in around 5 minutes.

The plugin community is active and you can easily install plugins/updates through the WP admin panel, again meaning that it’s very quick to do.

If you need many different page layouts, you’ll need to create (or find a theme that has) the required page templates. For each page you create, you can then choose from a page template dropdown. It works well, but with a lot of templates it gets less user-friendly.

Unfortunately the support community, while active and helpful, can sometimes struggle mainly due to the terrible layout of the support forums themselves. It can be difficult to find what you’re looking for, resulting in many threads asking the same questions. The official documentation is excellent, however, reducing the need for support in the first place.

Drupal

While you can use Drupal for smaller sites, it really shines when confronted with a challenge. There’s really not much that you can’t get Drupal to do. Sometimes called more of a “framework” than a CMS, the core installation doesn’t really give you much and the idea is to build onto this with modules available from drupal.org.

Personally, I’d never recommend Drupal to a complete newbie due to the relative complexity of its admin, and even navigating its official site. However if you need more flexible layouts than you could easily achieve with WP, need a lot of social networking features or a decent built-in forum, I’d encourage you to give it a go.

Help comes in the form of documentation, which should be enough to get you started, and support forums. The community here often assume a level of familiarity that new users may not have, so it’s best to let them know your level of expertise when asking for help.

Generally a more involved build, Drupal sites nevertheless often end up looking and functioning the best. It’s just a case of how brave you’re feeling and how much time you have to put into your project.

Joomla

The last of the “big three”, Joomla‘s support community deserves an early mention as it truly is fantastic. On the downside, that’s because it’s desperately needed. Like Drupal, Joomla can and does handle some big feature-rich sites, excelling in magazine-style or community sites.

Extensions come in free and paid format, so before deciding to go with Joomla it’s always best to check out which category your most important features will fall under.

Joomla’s main weakness is useability of the admin section. It looks snazzy enough, but you soon find yourself jumping through hoops to do simple tasks and having to learn unintuitive terminology. However, if you’re willing to learn then you can build yourself a very impressive site.

I’m setting up an online store, is this more complicated?

Each of the “big three” listed above can be used to create eCommerce sites through the use of plugins/modules/extensions. WordPress tends to be used for smaller stores and Drupal/Joomla for larger, more feature-dependent stores. Joomla’s most popular solution comes under the “free” category, so you won’t end up paying for any of these unless you want to.

If your site is just an online store, however, you don’t really need all the functionality of a typical CMS. You might need a page detailing delivery options, but you might not need social networking features or a blog. In these cases you have a few options.

Newer platforms like Magento or PrestaShop are very much “in” at the moment, with old standbys like Zen Cart and osCommerce falling behind in popularity. Take a look around the options, compare their feature lists and take a whirl on their demos, you’ll soon find the best option for you.

There are of course many more options than those listed here, this should be taken as a brief overview of the most commonly-known platforms and not as an exhaustive list. A bit of research never hurts, so if none of these sounds perfect then there’s a good chance something else out there will. If your favourite CMS isn’t listed here, feel free to leave a review in the comments and maybe help future readers to make their decision.