The Best Content Management Systems for Business Websites

Many factors were considered when we reviewed various content management systems (CMS) to determine which would be the best solution for use on business websites. Our main considerations were cost, reliability, security, flexibility and support.

Our top choices were very close and are indeed very popular content management systems. Rather than list them in order or rank we decided to simply list them in terms of what we recommend using them for.

Editor's choice CMS for corporate web design.

Drupal Content Management System - Drupal is an extremely powerful and versatile content management system and is currently used as the CMS for a number of high profile websites including whitehouse.gov. The system allows for the creation of custom content types each with their own customizable field set, permissions and properties.

While some systems may be better suited or designed for a specific purpose, such as blogging, portfolio, membership management or classifieds, Drupal provides a platform for developers and web designers to create hybrid systems to meet their own specific requirements.

With the Drupal content management system a web developer can create the precise functionality they need for both the front end user and back end administrators. While the learning curve for Drupal is much steeper than that of most other content management systems available, the time is well invested as Drupal could quite possibly be the one content management systems that can do it all.

Joomla Content Management System - Joomla is a much easier system to learn that Drupal but does still offer much of the core elements required of a professional business website. Joomla is a versatile CMS offering an easy to use administrator interface with a global resource pool of free add-ons and modules to extend the capabilities of the website.

Joomla can be used by small businesses to create lead generating websites, online portfolios, ecommerce web stores, and blogs. There are also many contributions, some available for free that will enable you to create a membership based website, paid directory or website for selling advertisements.

Wordpress Content Management & Blogging System - While used mainly for blogs, Wordpress is also a powerful and easy to use content management system. It offers website builders easy out of the box setup of design and layout as well as customizable configuration of blogging and user access.

The Wordpress platform can be used primarily as a content management system or as an ecommerce website, however we recommend using Wordpress if blogging will be the main use of the website. Otherwise we suggest using either Drupal or Joomla.

All three content management systems can be integrated with social networking tools and are very search engine friendly (depending on your particular configuration). All three are also available for FREE from the open source community.

We did not recommend these systems simply because they are available for free, on the contrary, despite the fact that these systems are free, we have found them to be the best solutions for business websites mainly because of their versatility, reliability and available features and support.

All three systems are widely used across the globe and have large communities of developers, designers and contributors, making them essentially the three largest "open" companies in the world, not even Google or Microsoft have the resources available to compete with a world of people and resources.

Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress are usually available for free with quick setup on standard hosting platforms. We recommend web hosting on Linux/Apache/MySQL with PHP and access to cpanel. See below for web hosting recommendations.