When it comes to a content management system for a small to medium business, open source CMS is often what comes to mind. While the download fee may be nominal or none, many organizations overlook the real costs associated with deployment and maintenance of an open source CMS.
At a minimum, an open source content management system needs to be customized to meet the look and feel of your brand as well as the unique requirements of your business. It is not unusual to spend 60-100 hours on technical expertise required to deploy your open source CMS.
But the real issue doesn't surface until a few months into production, when your site needs to grow. When your business evolves, so should your site. Do you have reliable technical resources to ensure that upgrades and additional features are implemented seamlessly?
As an IT consulting and a web development firm, we've watched our clients struggle through the same humps when implementing an open source CMS:
- Even "free" out-of-the-box content management systems still require hours of work and development expertise to install, setup and customize to match the look and feel of your brand.
- Additional development effort is always needed to work-out custom add-ons required to meet the unique needs of your business.
- A 3rd-party CMS can be too rich in features you don't need, and requires a lengthy learning process from your end users.
- A 3rd-party CMS is lacking a few key features that you do need, and customizing someone else's code is time-intensive.
- IT development firms charge a high hourly rate for maintenance and implementation of the new features
- Even the high hourly rates do not guarantee the quality of the service since the developers are essentially "digging in someone else's code". As a result, the site maintenance contract travels between multiple IT shops, leading to code inconsistencies, quick patches and "spaghetti" code.
In short, open source doesn't mean "free".
Unless your organization has IT resources dedicated to maintaining your CMS, the total effort involved in setting up, customizing, deploying and maintaining your open-source content management solution can be a lot more more expensive than sourcing this process to us.
We work with you on determining the right featureset for your business, we customize the look and feel, we ensure that your content contributers are provided with a work flow that allows them to easily get to their tasks and accomplish them. You don't have to track down 3rd party developers to fix bugs and maintain your content management system.
elKontent is about having a long term relationship with you and your website. We have the process in place, you tell us about your needs, and we set up and maintain your search engine friendly Ajax-rich Web 2.0 CMS for you!
|
|