Using SEO to Select a CMS
My favorite SEO blogger, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz in Seattle, has an excellent post titled “Choosing the Right CMS Platform for Your Website (from an SEO perspective).” It is about various aspects of SEO to consider when choosing a content management system (CMS) to build a site.
Instead of doing a comparison and contrast between different systems like Drupal and WordPress; Rand provides 12 issues to consider. These issues revolve around the ability of a site owner to control various design elements that search engines consider when assessing a site. These issues range from page title tags to CSS.
It is worth reading. Other than SEO, what are important issues you consider when selecting a CMS?
Tumblelogs Vs. Blogs
I became aware of the term tumblelog around a year ago and have been running across examples of tumblelogs with greater and greater frequency lately. According to Wikipedia, a tumblelog “is a variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary.” This site has a list of examples.
After circling around the concept for awhile, I set up a test tumblelog for myself using the Tumblr service. Here are my impressions of tumblelogging generally and Tumblr specifically:
Things I Like
(1) The interface is dead simple and slick. As you’ll see from the screenshot below, all you do is click on the content type you want to post and your off.
Drupal vs WordPress: Discussion Roundup
Our post a few weeks back about when to use Drupal and WordPress generated a pretty good discussion in the comments and on other websites. Below are the best questions/comments and our responses.
(1) Amnon – Drupal Israel: “Did you notice any performance difference between the systems?”
Considering the functionality both of them possess and what both the platforms are trying to accomplish, we have found WordPress is more resource intensive then Drupal. By default, WordPress makes a ton of database queries and has no built-in caching. Drupal has caching out of the box. Poorly optimized WordPress sites have actually become a sort of running joke on Digg, where WordPress site after site that appears on the Digg homepage goes down within a few minutes due to overwhelmed database servers. However, those with a bit of experience can run WordPress efficiently by using the WP-Cache plug-in and by optimizing your hosting set up. In addition, the brand new WordPress 2.3 release supposedly includes some serious speed improvements. We are testing the new release now.
In addition, when implementing both WordPress and Drupal you should be conservative in the plug-ins you use, as they can cause performance problems. This has been less of an issue for us in Drupal, mostly because Drupal has most of the functionality we need out of the box and we haven’t had to install a ton of plug-ins. Continue reading “Drupal vs WordPress: Discussion Roundup” »
Some Exceptional Drupal and WordPress Sites
In my article last week on WordPress vs Drupal, I gave some examples of sites built using those tools. Frankly, most of the examples I gave were sites we’d worked on. I figured I’d loop back and give examples of some exceptional sites I’ve come across (and didn’t work on) using each toolset. The goal is to show just how far you can push things using Drupal and WordPress.
Drupal
A full on newspaper website built using Drupal. Continue reading “Some Exceptional Drupal and WordPress Sites” »
WordPress vs Drupal
At this point, nearly all of the websites we build at The Bivings Group are either in WordPress or Drupal. Sure, we build custom applications on occasion and sometimes do Flash work that really doesn’t fit in a Content Management System. But mostly we use WordPress and Drupal.
Both are fantastic open source blogging platforms/content management systems with robust user communities. Both systems have their strengths and weaknesses. They are great alternatives to closed, paid platforms and much more cost effective than custom builds. As a web development shop, using Drupal and/or WordPress allows us to focus our energies on design and strategy as opposed to reinventing the content management wheel.
After implementing a variety sites using both WordPress and Drupal over the years, we’ve sort of developed our own unwritten rules as to when to use each platform.
Single Person / Group Blog (Use WordPress)
If you are building a straight on single person or group blog, I think WordPress is the way to go. It has all the base functionality you need built in and a robust set of plug-ins if you need to add on. The admin interface is dead simple – anyone with basic computer knowledge can master it in a few minutes. The install of the software is also simple and the templating system is not difficult to master.
Anything you want to do in WordPress, you can also do in Drupal. But Drupal is more complicated from a design/install perspective, and has tons of features you’d end up turning off/not using for something simple like this.
A good example of a blog like built using WordPress is our modest blog, The Bivings Report.
Blog Community (Use Drupal)
At a certain point your simple blog sort of crosses a line and becomes a blog community. Here are the things I look for:
- In some cases you are going to want people to navigate directly to an authors blog instead of the main page of the overall blog.
- Your blog has 10+ authors.
- There is the possibility that your commenters may themselves become contributors.
You can accomplish these goals by extending WordPress. You can also use WordPress Mu, which a community-version of WordPress that we don’t think is quite ready for prime time. However, these kinds of sites are pretty much the reason Drupal exists. All the community-based features you need are available right away upon setup with little tinkering required.
A good example of a blog community is TechPresident, which we had nothing to do with building.
Blog Driven Website (Use WordPress)
With its pages section and various plugins, WordPress can be used as a full on Content Management System for blog-based websites. Lots of companies (including us) long ago abandoned the old fashioned press release and use blogs as their primary content delivery mechanism. Assuming your overall templating system on the site is pretty straight forward and you don’t have hundreds of pages, WordPress works perfectly well for these types of sites.
Once again, Drupal can accomplish the same thing but it is a little more complicated to deal with and the admin interface is a little more complicated. It is sort of like driving a Ferrari in bumper to bumper traffic – you will get from point A to point B but you’d ultimately be better off weaving through traffic on a motorcycle.
The Washington Area Women’s Foundation is a good example of a WordPress-based site that we built. In addition to having all the content editable through WordPress, we also built a few databases as custom plug-ins.
Full Featured Website (Use Drupal)
At certain points, a site simply becomes too big for it to be sufficiently managed using WordPress. If you find yourself bumping against any of the following scenarios, you should probably be using Drupal:
- If you have multiple dynamic content types (press releases, news articles, blog posts, etc.). Drupal is great at allowing you to create this stuff on the fly, with WordPress you are hacking things together.
- If your site has more than a two template design structure (homepage and second levels).
- If you have numerous content blocks on the homepage or in sidebars that you will be editing frequently. Drupal’s block system is great at this kind of stuff.
- If you are trying to start small and expect your site to add tons of features/content moving forward.
We built a site for Monsanto Spain that uses Drupal as a full on Content Management System. This is a good example of this kind of website.