There are two key approaches to web project development: making use of a ready-made CMS (Content Management System) or developing such a system from scratch to meet a particular customer’s needs.
In most cases, the first option is used since it is faster and cheaper, and many turnkey solutions suitable for almost any project are available on the market.
You should be scrupulous about the choice of the platform on which your website will run. Much depends on your approach to this matter, including your project development cost. We will explain all this in more detail below in our article.
Open Source or License Purchase
Most popular platforms utilized to build websites have an open-source license. This means that anyone can use such a CMS, and no one has to pay for it.
However, there are commercial CMS as well, and you can use them exclusively in case you pay the license in advance. Companies that make money from selling and supporting such products develop that kind of systems.
The license cost may range from several hundred to several thousand dollars.
Basic Functionality and Extensibility
Each CMS has different functionality. That also applies to its extensibility. For example, there are lots of plugins for WordPress. They allow you to implement additional features on your website and pay only several tens of dollars for them or even get them for free.
However, when it comes to less popular or niche platforms, extensibility can be very limited. Moreover, the features available to the website owner initially cover only the basic needs.
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Popularity and Available Community
The larger the software product community is, the better it is for you. This means you will be able to get easy answers even to non-typical questions, find people who have faced the same tasks, and use many CMS add-ons for free under an open-source license as well.
If no community around the chosen platform exists, you will have to look for answers to almost all questions yourself. Furthermore, you will have to hire third-party developers to create all the add-ons you may need to expand your website functionality.
Available Specialists on the Market
The cost of development directly depends on available specialists on the market. The more software engineers offer their services for a particular CMS to the market, the lower the hourly cost of work will be. Conversely, software developers who work with a rare and specific platform will most certainly set higher rates.
In general, the situation here is similar to the one with programming languages.
How to Figure out What CMS Someone Else’s Website Operates On
You can find noteworthy solutions, tracking your competitors’ websites. For example, you can analyze what platforms their websites run on and draw some conclusions. You can pinpoint the CMS used by someone else’s website by resorting to dedicated online tools.
We recommend you to use such services as Whatcms.org and Builtwith.com to do so:
Besides finding out what specific platform a website utilizes, you can also learn a lot of other useful data: development technologies used, analytics systems connected, hosting, etc.
How Do You Choose the Right CMS for Your Website?
If you have to solve standard tasks and plan to implement typical functionality on your website, you would better choose a popular CMS for its development. In that case, you will not have a hard time finding good developers. If you use a rare and little-known engine, you will almost always end up with an increased development cost, sometimes increased several times.
However, every rule has exceptions. In this case, niche projects requiring specific functionality peculiar to certain CMS even if it has a small market share are an exception.
For example, while working on the projects, we often use ASP.NET Zero — a powerful and flexible solution used to implement a great variety of projects. However, if necessary, we can develop a CMS from scratch, taking customers’ individual needs into account.
If you are looking for a reliable partner for this kind of work, contact us, and let us talk over the details.
Flexibility, efficiency, and individual approach to each customer are the basic principles we are guided by in our work.
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