Building a website or blog with CMS such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal seems quite easy and requires only a few clicks on your host panel to bring your site online. What is the most important factor when you build a CMS based site is that you need a long term plan for the growth and expandability in terms of users, features, web space or even hosting. Let’s take a look at what you need to consider first when you decide to start your own content blog.
1. Function of the site: your site may be user used either for content or for selling products or both. You have to list what are the functions of your site.
2. Features: Make a list of what are the features you want to add in your site. For instance, you may want to have a block on the right-hand sidebar for your social media and category of your articles. Putting a slideshow in the front-page is becoming a popular trend to webmasters. As your blog grows, you many think of monetizing on it. If that is the case then decide where you want to show your ads-on the top side or right side. Some even love to put their ads inside articles wrap around the texts.
Things to do after deciding the desirable functions and features for your blog
Once you are absolute sure about the function and feature of your site, the next step is choosing the right CMS for you. For beginners both WordPress and Joomla are good, while a bit experience user may opt for Drupal. If you want extremely light weight and faster WebPages, you can think about wordpress otherwise use either Joomla or Drupal. Here in this article, I’ve mentioned only about the most three popular CMS platform- this is because of my exercise with them. So, what are the criteria for choosing the appropriate CMS for you can be ease-of-use and maintenance, easy-backup, available plug-ins to meet your blog’s functional requirements. I’ve identified the following basic plugins or extensions that a CMS must have and maintain it version up gradation along with the core CMS upgradataion:
1. SEO friendly URL: Drupal is one of the best CMS in creating clean URL.
2. Ad Block: wordpress and Joomla have a huge range of collection.
3. Security: for commenting blocking your may need Captcha or spam filter. Both Drupal and wordpress has good plugins to help your site free from unwanted comments or links.
4. easy-upgrade from the administrator module: WordPress’s automatic upgradaion function has no match. In Drupal you can not directly jump into the latest version unless you already have installed the previous release of the lasted updates.Joomla has an option to automatic update in their new 1.7 version.
4. Page cache generation: both Joomla and WordPress is ahead of Drupal in this sense, making a large collection of plugins for Cache
5. Automatic site map generator: all the three CMS has this feature.
6. Template: changing the look of your template can have a great impact on your visitors. Think about an ugly looking site selling diamonds. I’ve spend countless hours trying to customize free templates to meet my technical requirement of my blog. When I got bored, I found a few site offers clean template with rich functionality with less than 100 USD; some are even under 40 USD. If you want to spend more time on promotion of your blog, it is better to drive away the burden of managing your template to someone else.
What to do after installing my CMS?
Once you install the template, you must check the html code of your front page for validation. The easy way to check HTML validation is using the w3 validator, an online tool that helps anyone to check their codes for error. Another important thing is to check the page speed. Google has developed a pretty useful tool for checking a webpage speed, which has an online version; you can find this tool by doing a Google search with the term” Google page speed”
When you have your blog running the must-done regular maintenance is to take regular back-up of your site and update the core CMS codes, when it becomes available, and also don’t forget to update the plugging and all the modules.
To recapitulate, the things you need to consider before stating your blog with CMS are:
1. Select the features for your blog
2. Choose the right CMS
2. Choose a SEO friendly template
3. Find appropriate extensions or plugins
4. Validate codes and check page speed. If you find your page is scoring over 90 with Google page speed, then you are doing something right with the speed.
5. Take regular backup and add security features to your blog
6. Update the core and extensions code of your CMS
7. Read the forum discussion of your CMS (e.g. wordpress etc.) for issues with security and stability of your CMS. WordPress users can learn about all the security release of wordpress from its main site’s security category. There is a great
