Cage Match! WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal!

Anytime we get rolling on a site redesign project, we always have to tackle the question of which CMS is “best”. And anytime we’re working on a publishing site, at some point in the conversation we’re going to compare WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.

All 3 CMS have very devoted (and ardent) supporters. You can, without too much effort, find someone to sing the praises of any of these platforms.

Honestly, trying to settle on “best” is a waste of energy. Instead of some never ending squawk-fest about technology, figure out what’s going to be best for your organization going forward.

We make no secret about the fact that we like to recommend WordPress for a number of reasons.

When we work with organizations to bring new sites online, one of the big points of discussion revolves around site maintenance. It certainly feels like site-maintenance and curating content are real pain points. One of the ways that WordPress shines is in the low barriers to entry for more team members to quickly be trained on taking care of pages in the site. For a majority of users, any familiarity with a word processing program (like MS Word, Apple Pages, etc.), gets them 90% of the way towards creating and maintaining pages. That small piece of just “not being scared” to run the website is a huge benefit.

Through the years, we’ve also seen time and again that the Search Engine spiders seem to really do well with the architecture of WordPress sites. As a marketing agency to our core, this is always one of the biggest deciding factors for us. It’s a battle helping sites carve their way into Search Results and the last thing we want to deal with are barriers created by the technology of the site. WordPress is great here as spiders seem to understand the platform and (as long as the navigation is sound) can pretty easily find deep pages.

WordPress can also be “skinned” or customized to pretty much any appearance/experience you’d like. The old knock that “it’s just a blog site” is pretty well blown out of the water when you realize just how far it can stretch on design alone. Just a few of our own examples start to shine the light on that.

I’ll close with a final point about the strength of WordPress, and that’s the community around it. WordPress is so well established and has such a huge number of users supporting it, that it provides site owners tremendous options. From individuals and agencies that understand and can support it, to the galaxy of plug-ins and extensions available to quickly provide new features (like enhanced commenting and social sharing to name just two).

WordPress is an excellent option as a CMS that excels in delivering the site from a technical level and supporting digital marketing efforts for the site.

I believe very strongly that the best site platform is the one that solves your problems, no matter who the cool kids are talking about. Connect with me at LinkedIn or on Twitter (@tim_kauffold).

_{(My thanks to BruceTurner via Flickr for the image in this post!)}