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Web Easy Media is a Drupal shop, plain and simple. We create customized websites using Drupal as our Content Management System (CMS). When searching for a company to create your website, there are a lot of options out there.

In the highly competitive market place for website development, it’s important to stand out. The CMS a website company uses will have a large impact on the quality of the websites they build, how quickly they can build them and the overall costs of each one.

A CMS supports the creation, management, syndication, publishing and alteration of all of the information on a website. A web development company creating the interactive websites used today use a CMS to create a website with the end user in mind. The quality of the CMS and the developer’s knowledge of it will have a large impact on the overall functionality and look of the website itself and the ultimate usability for the end customer.

There are three main Content Management Systems being used by web developers across the globe: Wordpress, Joomla!, and Drupal. Each one has its highlights and limitations and none of them work for everyone. The experience and skill level of a developer or designer warrants which CMS will be most useful for his or her needs.

Wordpress
Wordpress is an easy to use CMS that allows for single or multiple user websites with excellent blogging capabilities to be created and managed with ease. Almost anyone can use it. Whereas it excels at ease of use, though, it lacks in flexibility.

Wordpress was designed to be a blogging platform and adding modifications to make it more dynamic is often difficult and time consuming. According to Good Web Practices, “The very reason that Wordpress was created was to keep people from wanting to customize it to do things that are much more advanced…any modification that you give to it may very well cause it to break”.

Joomla!
Joomla! is a step above Wordpress, having vast resources for developers and designers alike to use to create visually dynamic websites. Joomla! has a large community of users, offering technical support to both developers and designers with issues, along with the end users of the websites.

Though Joomla! is a good CMS for starting developers and designers, it lacks the strength to create flexible websites with the ideal “end user” usability. Businesses want sites that can both effectively grow with the needs of the business and be managed by non-technical personnel.

In a recent report conducted by Idealware, which evaluated the most popular Content Management Systems being used today, it found that Joomla! “doesn’t offer an easy way to create a workflow based on section or type of content”. In other words, end users have more difficulty updating and making additions to their websites than users of the other leading content management systems.

Drupal
Drupal and Joomla! are often compared to each other and for good reason. Both offer developers and designers great tools for creating the dynamic websites businesses need to be competitive. What makes Drupal stand out is its ability to take the next step and offer long term, cost effective website solutions with its flexibility and powerful tools.

The learning curve is harder using Drupal, but once a developer or designer takes the time to learn how to proper utilize the features and community of this CMS, the end results are worth the effort. Those creating the websites can make great websites faster and cheaper and end users have unmatched functionality in managing their own websites.

Understanding the strengths and limitations of a particular CMS should be a top criterion when choosing a company to build your website. The functionality and usability of a website is directly linked to the CMS and as your company grows, you need one that fuels your expansion without the need of expensive retooling.