The Alver Valley Web Design Company

Recently I’ve been attempting to find the right CMS to create non-blog websites that was open source, easy to customise and most importantly easy to create my own bespoke templates. Well, I reckon I’ve found it! Check out Website Baker. This has got to be the simplest CMS I’ve worked with, getting a site ready within minutes, including the installation process. Ok it was with a template but nonetheless it was really quick and within a few more minutes I more less had the backend sorted too (although it’s fair to say that most CMS admin interfaces are pretty similar, most users will only experience one CMS ). Of course it means my clients get a CMS that even the rookie website owner can use!

Other, Full CMS that I tried included the rather ace Wordpress, cool but quite involved, and i’m still not happy with it to design web sites rather than blogs which, at the end of the day, Wordpress is brilliant at. Then there’s Joomla, which to be fair i’m still considering, Drupal, which I’m sorry to say; I loathed! Modx, again I really didn’t like this, dunno why, I reckon I had a thick moment when I tried it! I did like the Lite CMS SurrealCMS, although I found the fact the CMS wasn’t hosted on the same server as the site a rather hard selling point. Clients i’ve discussed this with generally want everything in the same place and don’t want to have to login into totally different area when they make their site changes. I guess it’s a control thing! However I did like it’s simple approach, using classes to denote what is editible data.

I’d recommend checking out the following link for ten Light CMS options10-simple-and-light-weight-cms-solutions. Most of these options seem worth investigating and although it’s not on the list Wesite Baker was recommeded in the users comments and just seemed to be the perfect option. Ok, it’s not all singing and dancing like Wordpress but it is a Lite CMS afterall, and there’s plenty of suport for JQuery (my fav!) Another system i want to get my teeth into is Concrete5. It looks fab, so if anyone has tried it let me know how you got on! In fact if anyone has any other CMS offering then let me know!