CMS or Not?

[JMeZigns]

I have been studying up on some popular CMS's (Joomla!, Wordpress, Drupal, etc..) and have some questions I'd like to fire off the community.

How steep is the learning curve for these CMS's?

From a designers standpoint, having a background in hand-coding XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript; Is implementing a CMS difficult on an existing site? Do I have to change my layout based on available templates?

Do you experience many "mistakes" in content being committed by the client? i.e. image optimization, font manipulation, etc..?

Once I have set up a CMS user account for the client, can I expect many phonecalls/emails concerning the interface of the CMS?

For smaller sites (less than 20 pages) would I be better off offering a content management rate ($x/month) to the user?

Thanks in advance for any replies.

 

[Blue Archer]

CMS's are made to be user-friendly so there isn't much of a learning curve for computer confident people, but users who are less knowledgeable will have a hard time learning how to use them.

Every CMS has strengths and weaknesses. Before deciding which one to use make sure you establish what you are looking for in a CMS and then do a lot of research to see which one can handle your needs the best. If you are working with primarily small websites then Drupal maybe the way to go.


The average user will have to change their layout to fit with the provided templates. However, if a user is confident enough with HTML then they would be able to create or modify a template to fit their needs.

The company I work for, Blue Archer, uses their own proprietary CMS called Accu CMS. Although this system is extremely easy to use and learn, we sill have to provide support for it. We offer free bi-weekly training sessions to all of our clients through webinars, in addition to our support page.

I think even if the page is smaller then 20 pages, you would be better off using a CMS. That way the client can handle their own content which should save you from a lot of headaches as well as freeing up a lot of your time to work on other projects.

I hope this helped.

 

[JMeZigns]

Thanks Blue Archer,

I am going to take a closer look at Drupal now. I have been messing around with Joomla! for the past few days and I can definitely see the power of using a CMS.

Do most CMS's require knowledge of PHP for creating a template? If so, perhaps I should start on some PHP tutorials first. I have done most of server side scripting using Perl. I imagine PHP to be similar. I hope this is the case.

Thanks again!