Select the Best Content Management System for Your New Website

Part 2 of the Perfect Foundation Series

Once you’ve bought a domain and hosting, you want to put some content on that domain instantly. Getting content onto your domain will get your foot in the door so you can build the site out into the distant future.

What Are Content Management Systems?

Put your site up online within minutes and be able to scale it out by using content management systems.

A content management system (CMS) is a program that you install on your domain to provide you with an online admin area where you can write and publish content to your websites.

Top Three CMSs: Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress

The three CMSs that stand out among the multitude available to you are Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress.

These three CMSs are open source, which means they’re free. And they’re popular, which means you will have strong communities to support you and provide you with tons of cool features. They all will give you the ability to publish to your domain instantly and build it out into a great-looking site that you can profit from.

The main strengths of each are the following: To make and publish a blog site as quickly as possible, go with WordPress. To make and publish a professional site as quickly as possible, go with Joomla. For long-term professional or community sites, go with Drupal.

Here’s a chart comparing their relative popularity based on the number of searches for them on Google:

Because these are open source platforms, you can download tons of add-ons created by programmers around the world for free. These add-ons make these platforms able to do almost anything you want, instantly and with minimal technical knowledge from you.

After you’ve installed one CMS, start inputting plug-ins for it. For Drupal go to http://drupalmodules.com/. For Joomla, go to http://extensions.joomla.org/. For WordPress go to the “Plugins” tab within your site’s WordPress admin area.

Plug-ins and Open Source

Even though plug-ins give you great control over making your site great, plug-ins are the most vulnerable part of your website. Read about the plug-ins you plan to use to make sure your site will be safe.

Overall, however, open source systems are in certain regards much more safe than commercial systems because everyone who uses the software can make it safer by sending corrections or “patches” to the CMS organization. The Obama administration website “whitehouse.gov” recently switched to Drupal citing safety as a key reason they made the switch to the open source CMS.

Installing Your CMS

You will have a GoDaddy domain and hosting account if you followed the recommendations of the first article in this series “Perfect Foundation.” You can install all of these CMSs within your GoDaddy account with no complicated decisions.

Download the free WordPress blog platform by signing into GoDaddy, clicking “Hosting,” then “Manage Account,” then “Your Applications,” then “Blogs,” then “WordPress,” and finally “Install Now.” Follow the same general steps to install Drupal and Joomla from within your GoDaddy account.

If you cannot use your hosting account to auto-install these CMS platforms, then follow these steps:

1. Go to joomla.org, wordpress.org, or drupal.org
2. Download the version you want of the CMS software
3. Unzip the file, read the instructions
4. Upload to your site via FTP — which was described in the first article in this series — and start the installation.

In Affiliate Classroom v2 you can read how to use CMS programs to quickly build revenue-generating websites. Get instant access by signing up for our $1 offer at http://my.affiliateclassroom.com/.

Please post a comment below if you have advice that others could benefit from about using CMSs. Thanks!