So you need a shiny new website, and you want to be able to update it yourself. Does this need to cost the earth?

Whilst we do produce a lot of bespoke online systems that take many months to develop, we are big fans at Absolute of using ready baked, and open source content management system (CMS) software. As a company we like to give our customers the best possible return on their investment, and by using these systems, it allows us to have websites up and running quickly and with a fraction of the expense for the client but still with an awesome feature set.

There are many systems out there that can be used - Joomla is a system that we like using here at Absolute as it is very flexible, has a good set of features out of the box, and has a wide range of plug-in components to expand on a projects functionality. We find Joomla is (usually) a good fit for most small to medium sized websites where admin controls are needed, allowing clients to update and manage the site easily through a simple set of tools and wysiwyg editors.

Wordpress is a great platform if you need a small site up and running at little expense. It was originally developed as a blogging platform, but it is easy to develop templates for wordpress that take it far beyond the realms of a simple blog, utilising it as a simple CMS to create pages, image galleries, news articles which can be simply connected to social networks and (with a little work) optimised for search engines.

We have developed websites in lots of 3rd party systems at Absolute, such as Drupal, Magento, Pinnaclecart and Social Engine. We have also gone down the bespoke route, developing our own platforms when the client has very specific requirements (see our work for Hilton Hotels where we built a loyalty points system) or developing systems to suit the needs of a specific sector (we have built our own platform, iCMS Educate, for the schools market).

As with all our projects here at Absolute we like to take the time to listen to what the clients business needs are before suggesting which technologies are the best fit. Feel free to give us a call to have a chat about the requirements of your project - in many instances, a pre-built CMS system will provide a perfect solution to get your company online.