Build template site for sale from ground up or with CMS? Please help with advice.

[inifinity99]

Hello everyone. I wanted to get experts opinion on what we should do with our next website.

We are in a real estate business, apartment rentals. We want to create a site for ourselves, but also a complete 'turn key' website, which could be sold to other operators around the world, fully and completely customizable. Every imaginable aspect of it should be customizable including changes of logos, enabling / disabling of various features, etc. The idea is to sell it to our competitors or other operators in other cities.

My question is - should we hire someone to build this ground up in PHP or should we go with a CMS? All of my websites now were built ground up in PHP but I see that CMS is very popular now. If CMS - which one would be recommended for such a project?

I appreciate any feedback in advance and if any clarification is required pleas let me know.

 

[inline853]

A CMS is the way too go

Definately a CMS is the way to go. In the past few years the quality and ease of CMS to set up and use has grown greatly. For a project like this you should us modx or expressionengine. I would personally use modx because its easy to learn and search engine optimized. Check it out http://modxcms.com/

 

[scottg]

I would definately use a php based cms like joomla or wordpress. I built a real estate site in Joomla, with help of the component called Mosets Hot Property. And if you build the joomla site based on a high quality ready made template, its cake to change the look and feel for your customers. I have several joomla real estate templates on my site.

 

[ishie]

I actually prefer using Drupal because of its immense flexibility. Drupal is great for social networking, although not always that evident.