The Key Differences Between Content Management Systems
Your content management system (CMS) determines a lot about how you interact with your website, how you update it, and what it’s best suited for. Business demands aside, you should have an eye on the ways your customers will interact with your website as well.
Mad Genius aims to pair our clients with the CMS that best suits their needs. A lot of this information can tend to be a bit…dense. Since most people coming to us have an expertise that falls outside the exciting (and we don’t mean that facetiously) world of web development, figuring out what each CMS does can be tricky.
We're here to help.
WordPress
WordPress is one of the best and most flexible content management systems. It offers exceptional performance and ease of use for anyone who may not be a full-time web developer coding in a dark, windowless room while wearing aviators so the glow of the screen cinematically reflects off them.
It’s a popular CMS for many reasons, including the security and performance benefits, its relative cost-effectiveness, and incredible flexibility. It has countless plug-ins that you can download to a given site to give it new capabilities, but because the CMS is open source, it allows you to create truly custom sites. You can create unique designs and functionalities rather than just following a template.
Editor Options
WordPress sites offer several ways to edit content.
The Gutenberg Editor
The Gutenberg editor allows you to use custom “blocks” when adding new content. A block just refers to different types of content or user interface (UI) features. The blocks you use the most would likely be headlines, paragraphs, bulleted images, and buttons. These sites come with some generic blocks that you can use. When we are building a site for a client, we’ll create numerous custom ones meant to match the appearance of the website and the content that’s specific to that site. That way clients can add and customize the appearance of new content they’re uploading after the site has been launched. This editor is for most people, the easiest and most intuitive to use.
Classic Editor
The classic editor was most commonly used before the Gutenberg editor came to be. It looks a lot more like a traditional document editor, like Microsoft Word or Google Docs, with the text editing tools at the top. That’s where you can style text.
Alternatives
The Gutenberg and classic editor are by far the most commonly used, there are several other options. For example, the Divi editor allows you to drag-and-drop certain assets, but it’s more similar to a template based content management system like Squarespace in terms of function.
Shopify
Shopify, as the name would suggest, is built specifically as an e-commerce platform. It’s built specifically to host products, and the backend is filled with tools to help you fulfill orders and an analytics suite to help you track how much business you’re doing. One of the main differences between Shopify and WordPress is that Shopify is primarily a “no-code platform,” which means users primarily build their sites around designs and layouts provided by Shopify. This makes it easier for users who want to set up shop without any knowledge of code, but it also makes it more difficult to customize and turn into something unique that stands out from other Shopify sites.
Squarespace
Squarespace is one of the most popular template-based content management systems due to its affordability and easy user experience. Squarespace really lowers the barrier to entry to having a website by providing users with just about everything they need, like page layouts, different UI features, and a photography library.
Headless Sites
Headless sites aren’t a content management system but we’re going to talk about them anyway because this is our blog and the law can’t touch us here. Headless sites are when the front end (what the user sees) and the back end (what the developers or web admins see) are built separately. These are typically reserved for truly custom sites and especially for heavy front-end development lifts. There are a few content management systems that are specifically headless, such as Sanity, which gives developers a lot of flexibility while being able to create a site with great security and performance.
The Mad Genius Recommendation
We’re almost always going to suggest clients go with WordPress or something custom. A custom website offers better performance and more flexibility than some of the more template-based content management systems. We’ll build both headless and regular (headful?) websites depending on what the job calls for. This site that you’re looking at right now is actually a headless site (plot twist!). And in the vast majority of WordPress sites, we would recommend the Gutenberg editor because it allows us to create custom features that are still easy for clients to add to the site after launch.
Does reading about content management systems restore your childlike sense of wonder and make you want to launch your next web project? Just the second part? That’s fine. Fill out the form below and we can start discussing your new website.