Welcome!

[powerboy]

Hi,

I have been out of the web design game for a little while. I was wondering if anyone could suggest a CMS that allows designers a lot of control while still retaining tons of functionality? The simpler the better.

I really enjoy doing XHTML and CSS but want to be able to offer clients the functionality of a CMS. I do not have a strong background in programming (php, asp etc) and actually would prefer to avoid it.

Also, I have heard that blogs are not as SEO friendly as normal web pages. Does this mean that using wordpress as a CMS would be problematic?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

[Horttcore|DE]

nope Google loves WordPress!

I would go for WordPress as it is very simple and very flexible system.

[Rask]

CMS software is as SEO compatible as you make them. Coding a WordPress theme from the ground up for instance gives you standards compliant and SEO effective pages, when compared to modding a ready theme they supply you with. This also allows you to create a "non-bloggish" design for it, as they say.

When I create a theme for WordPress, my procedure goes as: design in Photoshop or equivalent, base markup in HTML, extensive page styling using HTML and CSS, design all pages, even some not probably needed, and then finally add the WordPress back-end code (WordPress template tags, etc.).

The WP back-end syntax is quite easy to learn, and the WP Codex is filled with explanations of each template tag and all sorts of short codes. You don't really need to learn any PHP/MySQL to have WordPress run as you like, just a little time taken to learn the functions and tags you're supplied with.

The only problems I had when learning was understanding how The Loop (which displays posts from the database) is handled. But after running through the Codex, it seemed quite simple when explained in human language.

But you should check out all the other CMS softwares too, for the best solution for you. I prefer WordPress for being free, highly modifiable to my likings and having a big community around it.

[josedaniel]

For easy theme development Wordpress, for a strong web development Drupal.

[crome]

I love Wordpress too but if you really don't want to develop themes and just want to offer your clients a quick easy solution to edit their pages I'd suggest Cushy CMS (http://www.cushycms.com/). It is incredibly easy to use and if setup correctly can provide a huge amount of editing capability to your client without them needing any editing experience.

[mzslater]

There is no inherent conflict between CMS and SEO. Many of the older CMS solutions have issues, however. There's three things you want to pay attention to:

1. What do the URLs look like? Ideally, you want the topic or title of the page or at least some related keywords in the URL, and you don't want URLs that are only numeric (like http://www.site.com?page=1234)

2. Can you control all the metadata? You want full control over the pagetitle, meta description, and meta keywords on every page.

3. Can you control where your content is on the page? You don't want the template system putting a lot of garbage above your content in the HTML.

Even with the best CMS, though, the heart of the SEO problem is in your hands: picking your target keywords, writing good pagetitles and descriptions, putting good content in H1 tags, having lots of good content on the site, linking things together well, and getting lots of incoming links. No CMS can do any of that for you.

If you want only minimal CMS capability, you might look at something like CushyCMS (http://www.cushycms.com) or LightCMS (http://www.speaklight.com).

Many designers like Wordpress (http://www.wordpress.com if you use their hosting, http://www.wordpress.org if you want to host it yourself), though customizing the template tends to get you into PHP-land (and you're quite limited unless you host it yourself).

Expression Engine (http://www.expressionengine.com) is a popular commercial product that many designers like.

If you want to stay away from hosting headaches, security updates, monitoring, backups, module incompatibilities, etc., you should strongly consider hosted solutions.

And if I may be permitted to mention my own company's product, Webvanta (http://www.webvanta.com) is a very powerful hosted CMS that is also easy to use and allows you full control over all the HTML, CSS, and SEO.

[medavid]

I really suggest you to try Zimplit CMS. I have been using it for a week now and this tool is perfect for designers. I am not very strong at programming and Zimplit don´t need any programming knowledge. You can use your design (html, css) and make fully editable template from it in minutes. Zimplit seems also SEO friendly at least they say so.

[Daimz]

I have been trying out http://www.silverstripe.org and I find it has been really helpful they have really handy tutorials that make understanding it easy. I tried wordpress and it worked alright but I never got it to the point where I would be happy handing it on to a client. It was a big leaning curve for someone like me with very little coding skills.

[Parallax]

Another vote for Wordpress.

[claviska]

Well, that obviously depends on what you need. If you want a good blogging platform, I would suggest Word Press (yup, another vote!). If you want something more powerful, with more functionality then go with Drupal. If all you really want is a really simple piece of software that can edit your HTML files directly, try out Surreal CMS.

I've personally worked with WordPress, Drupal, and others -- and I'm the developer of Surreal -- but I'm being completely objective in telling you that you really need to look at your requirements first and foremost before choosing a CMS.

Sometimes you need something quick and easy for basic editing, which is where Surreal comes in. Setup your site, link up the CMS, and hand it off. Simple. If that's all you need, have at it

Other times you (or your client) will want to blog on a daily basis. A flat-file CMS simply won't do in this case, so look to something that specializes in that. WordPress is my personal favorite. In fact, I'll be setting up a blog for Surreal within a few weeks which will probably run on WordPress. Another great thing about WordPress is it's community. They have amazing members and thousands of plugins and themes to pick from out-of-the-box.

Another option for a blog-based site would be to manage your main pages (the pages that don't change frequently) with Surreal and run your blog through Blogger. I've seen this done a number of times and most people that take this approach tend to be scared of databases. There are plenty of tutorials online to get you started with this. (If you do this, however, I would recommend using a subdomain for the blog portion of the site for security purposes...but that's just me.)

Drupal...well, I like Drupal and would choose it over Joomla and similar systems any day, but usually it's overkill. Yes, you can run a blog-based site off of it, but unless you have a lot of other things you're going to be doing with the site, stick with WP because it's easier to install and manage.

All-in-all, and based on your post (not wanting to code, wanting something as simple as possible), I would say that you're a pretty good candidate for Surreal CMS. You can get the site setup in a matter of minutes most of the time, and you don't have to know a lick of server-side code. Just add the "editable" CSS class to your HTML elements and edit. There's a couple videos on the site that will get you started.

As far as search engines not liking blogs as much...well, I don't think that's entirely true. If you have good content, you can perform well with a WordPress (or other) site. Having good content will also increase the likeliness that someone will want to blog, tweet, or otherwise link to your page(s) so it helps two-fold. In essence, keep the quality high, keep the 1990s SEO "tricks" out, and no matter what platform you run, your site will most likely perform very well

[Adam FC]

I agree totally with josedaniel; Wordpress for sites which are blogs (and with a small handful of top-tier static pages) and Drupal for the big stuff. This is how I decide between CMS use, and it's served me well thus far!

[designcode]

I will vote for WordPress, very easy to use, flexible. You can easily modify its themes to work WordPress as any kind of website. Another the plus point of using WordPress is its active community. You can easily find help on internet doing a search.

[hslaszlo]

Try the Frog cms, it's really easy to use.
Some examples:
http://a211.hu
http://biodrogasystems.hu
http://ips-building.sk

[halowebstu]

I just saw Frog CMS - looked good. I was suprised they didn't have more donations though for it!!

I used Wordpress before I built my own system. Once you get the hang of it you can get sites up pretty quickly!

PS - hi everyone I am new!

[Iceblogger]

If you are familiar with some HTML and PHP, TYPOlight (www.typolight.org) might be the right one for you . It's really great and leaves plenty of space for your own creativity!

Best regards
Alex