Okay – the question may seem dumb. You say “of course yes” – it is easy, installs fast and has looots of features. And most of all it does not require you to have much technical idea of what is going on with all this PHP, MySQL and stuff. Even if you pay something it still saves your time and time is money…
Sure… But go back to the project itself. What is your purpose? To build a unique website on your desired topic. Unique in look and contents. Only this can guarantee success of the project in search engines optimalisation and users rating. But what do you get with those ready-to-go CMS? Themes – few standard themes. So if 2000 people use this software and there are 4 themes your site will look like 500 other sites… This is no good.
“But there are loads of free themes on the web!” -Okay, yes, not all of them are free, but sure there is more. There is also more sites using this and other CMS’ with all of their themes… But let’s say you end up with sharing “the look” with 2-5 other website. Better, but not perfect. And if your theme is really nice it has quite a chance to become popular…
So what now? To make it really unique you need a little bit of D.I.Y with the theme files. But this requires at least minimum HTML and CSS, not to mention it would be very good to know some PHP on top of that… Huh… What is the option then? Basically there are two – either you learn mentioned above or live with the fact some site look alike as yours. There is a third option too – you get someone to do it for you…
“Okaaaay – so should I or should I not use ready CMS???” Well, I say yes, no matter if you are beginner or advanced, do it for money/company or pleasure. The reason is quite simple – time and effort to build it from scratch is just not worth it (unless you are a professional and really do this things in minutes/hours…). But how to stand out of the crowd? By trying! The picked up theme is good for start. Then in time, if you learn (because you do it for pleasure) or earn more money (business) you can make effort (in time or money) to make it unique. This or that way the real thing that makes people come back is the CONTENT which actually is another vote for CMS in matter of saving time and using it for building good content 🙂
I haven’t said anything about the soft yet. This is because it really depends on what you really want your site to be.
Blog – WordPress – the best soft I ever worked at – it is extremely EASY! in installation, use, customisation and adding extra modules. If you want blog, this IS your choice 😉 Oh, yeah, it has like a million free themes…
Forum – I’ve got experience with two kinds of software in this field – phpBB and VBulletin. The first one is quite simple. However installing any extra features require some… patience 😉 In looking and changing all those template files… It’s biggest feature is being totally FREE. And you can really have nice forum with it. VBulletin on the other hand is a commercial product. The licence for 1 year is around $100! But if you can afford it it is worth the price. Better support, easier installation of additional modules, more functions in administration panel and for users too. Worth trying it, but if you are sure you really need it 😉
General CMS – you just want a website, some news, few articles, few pics etc… Yes, this is your choice. I will skip commercial products, mainly because there is quite a lot of free and good software! Just to give few names of popular ones: Joomla, Mambo, PHP-Fusion… Basically there are almost the same. So my advice – look for feature you will want to include, extra modules, themes etc. on websites supporting such for those CMS. See how they look like, are they easy to install and if they are free (yes, people write those addons also for sale, so be careful – free basic pack does not mean all of the addons are also free!). Once you’ll find what you want go for it! 😉
And there is a cherry on top of that! Imagine you have forum and after a while things go sooo good you want to make it a portal. How to do it without any data loss? It turns out there are software ready for that. E.g. MKPortal can adopt some popular forums (phpBB, VBulletin) and other CMS. It will even import the skin! Beautiful.
OK, that’s all from me, hope this helps some of you with a start 😉
Best wishes,
Piotrek