Most web designers look for ways to get the websites up and running in less time. Nowadays there are a lot of Content Management Systems (CMS) to download on the net. They all have their benefits.

The problem with existing CMS is that you need to customize it to suit the needs of your customer. It is very important than to ask yourself if the time you spend modifying the existing CMS is worth it. Can you get a site up and running faster than you modify an existing CMS?

I had this dilemma twice already. Once with a classified real estate ads site and the other with a tour company.

Classified ads
This customer wanted a site where visitors could place real estate ads for free. These free listing should include the name, telephone number and email address of the advertiser, the type of listing he was offering and a brief description.

Advertisers who wanted to add pictures of their property and give a more detailed specification, could do so for a small price. Since Suriname does not have a lot of options for online payment, the advertiser would then get an order number, which he could use to go pay for the ad at the office. As soon as payment was done, the ad was placed for the period for which was paid.

The catch: Visitors shouldn’t have to log in to place their ads. Since the Internet is not is widely distributed in Suriname, forcing visitors to login could scare off some potential customers, the client argued against my advice.

I found some nice content management systems that would allow me to do this. One of them is Drupal. But I spent so much time getting this to work that it all didn’t seem worth the price the man paid. I especially had problems with displaying search results of ads with picture only.

After spending days trying to get Drupal to work, I gave up. I decided to write this from scratch. I did this in half the time I spent on finding the right CMS and modifying it. This site is currently still under development, since there was an addition to the work. The customer eventually decided to separate properties for sale from properties for rent.

Tour/adventure site
I really thought this one would be a quick fix with some CMS. This was supposed to be a simple tour operator website with a list of tours, a descriptive page, where there would be information about the tour, pictures of the tour, what you can expect to see there, the price, just the regular tour operator stuff.

For this tour site, there had to be made so many links on the description page. It should b the page where you can find almost anything you need to know about the tour, some of the information only a click away. But, this site needs to be multi-lingual. And this is where I got into trouble when trying to use a CMS.

Most of the wishes of the customer could have been met with some CMSes. Even though it took me a lot of days to get everything linked to each other, there were 2 things that gave me problems: making it Multi-lingual and linking pictures to specific tours and other resources.

I spent weeks trying to get this to work, but then the customer was starting to breath down my neck. A couple of days ago I decided to ditch the CMS and start from scratch.

Starting from scratch was not really starting from scratch in this case, because I’d already built tour operator websites, like for Oetsi Tours and Sun and Forest Tours. Since the Sun and Forest site was my first completed project where I used PHP and MySQL to produce a standard compliant website, I could easily reuse the code used for this site.

It’s been three days, and I’m almost finished with this site, from scratch. The admin section is almost finished and the template is ready. I just need to finish the picture upload and linking section, then I’m ready to put everything on it’s place in the template. The admin section will be finished tonight, so I’m expecting the site to be ready by late tomorrow. The customer will then enter the content via the admin section. While he’s doing that, there may be some more tweaking and fixing needed to be done, which could bring the launch date to about half way this month somewhere.

Conclusion
If you are sure that a content management system will be easy and quick to adjust to the needs of your customer, that is probably the best away to go. But as soon as you realize that you’re spending more time adjusting than it would take to build the site from scratch, stop putting energy into the CMS and start from scratch. Most web designers I know have code lying around which they can reuse, so building from scratch doesn’t necessarily means that you will need to start anew.

Book
According to the reviews of this book, Content Management Bible is a very handy reference for those who work with content regularly.