Content management systems & OutSourcing

Content management systems (CMS) have become the dominant platform for websites over the last fifteen years. Thanks to them, the traditional web designer profession of creating a website with an HTML editor (such as Adobe Dreamweaver) has nearly died out. Instead, web designers are nowadays responsible for setting up content management systems. Web developers who still produce code now work more with developing web applications. But even these have little to do with the HTML-based websites from earlier.

Content management systems vs. web applications

A content management system is itself a web application, but one with which you can create content-based websites following the modular principle. A powerful, standardized back end is used for its management.

This sets them apart from all other custom-made web applications whose appearance and functioning are unique. These can be websites that look very similar to their CMS counterparts. Since developing a web application can be relatively expensive, this technology is often used for other approaches. Facebook is a web applications, or Spotify’s or Skype’s web apps. But even complex online portals with interactive features like to fall back on proprietary web applications.

The best content management systems

There are many CMS, after all, the idea behind it is very old. You can find an extensive list of content management systems on Wikipedia. The overview shows that CMS are not bound to a specific technology. There are Java CMS, ASP.NET CMS, Perl CMS, Python CMS, Ruby on Rails CMS. PHP has been prevalent for a long time, in addition to the LAMP Stack as a technological basis.

WordPress has held the dominant position among CMS for the longest time. The content management system, which is also realised with PHP, holds a commanding market share of 58.5%. The second most popular CMS, Joomla, only holds 7.2%. The list continues with Drupal (4.8 percent), Magento (2.6 percent), Blogger (2.4 percent), Typo3 (1.4 percent), Bitrix (1.4 percent) and Shopify (1.4 percent). As these figures from W3Techs show, more than a fifth of all websites run on the CMS WordPress. You can’t go wrong if you choose WordPress.

WordPress uses a modular approach, as well as the other CMS. Simply install the free software package on a PHP and MySQL capable web server and build a website with the help of a suitable template (for the design) and plugin (for additional features). Almost everything is possible, from elaborate news sites to company homepages, up to e-commerce solutions. However, a truly professional setup requires extensive expertise, an understanding of design and technical skill.

Web applications and web frameworks

If you want a proprietary web application, you will need one or more suitable web developers and web designers. However, they will not just start unstructured programming with HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP, but will instead use a powerful web framework which develops and manages the web application. Selecting the right web framework is an important decision because later the web app might not be able to be brought onto a different platform, or only with great difficulty. Some of the most popular web frameworks and technologies are ASP.NET, Angular JS, Ruby on Rails and Django. CodeIgniter, Symfony, CakePHP and Zend are several PHP based web frameworks which let you develop and maintain complex web applications in the WordPress style.

Outsourcing the website development

As you can tell, PHP based CMS and WordPress especially should be the first choice when designing a website. You can easily find web developers specialised in this everywhere. Usually this involves freelancers or web design agencies who put together a homepage according to your exact instructions and who provide a briefing for the back-end operation. Since this is still a lot of work despite the great advantages of the content management system, it can cost quite a bit. The salary level in Europe and the high demand for these sorts of services also add to the high cost.

If you use a qualified CMS developer from abroad, you can reduce this cost to a fraction of its original price. This has led to an increasing demand for Indian developers for website development over the last few years. India is known as an IT nation, developers there speak good English and the salary level in India is unbeatably low.

If you would also like to realise your own website project at a low cost, we can help with our specialised Indian services. We have been providing IT specialists from the Asian country for years, and have many years of experience in this area. Our clients can conclude a contract directly with us, and we will then take over everything from recruitment, to project management at a distance with our own Scrum professionals, up to the payment of the Indian web developer. We stand for quality and security as a European company. At the same time, you can tap into the cost advantages in India with us.