Drupal, Joomla, or Wordpress? Which is best for your site?

In the world of web content management, there are hundreds of systems available. Evaluating and choosing the right package is a critical step in branding and marketing yourself for the long haul. Here's a quick look at the two extremes:

  • Picking an overly complicated service usually results in difficulty learning and training end-users, as well as higher costs for setup, deployment, and ongoing changes/customizations by a web administrator/developer.
  • Picking a basic service that is ready "out of the box" can often be limited in the ability for customization.  While setup and deployment may have a low cost, ongoing changes and customizations may take on significant costs or in some cases, not be possible.

More often than not, many companies that wind up choosing either of the above options often end up having difficulty drawing traffic on the internet to generate leads and sales, and ultimately invest in a complete site overhaul utilizing a new platform.  

Key to a healthy ongoing business marketing relationship is finding a happy medium with:

  1. a widely supported and accepted content management system
  2. developers/web administrators experienced in customizing and updating the content management system
  3. copywriters and SEO specialists that understand your mission and target audience

Water and Stone, a digital agency compiles an annual survey about content management systems, and released its 2011 Open Source CMS Market Share Report this past November.  Among the top three Content Management Systems in this year's survey were:  Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal.  While Wordpress & Joomla currently lead in the CMS market, it should be noted that not all Drupal downloads are tracked and the numbers for Drupal distributions are skewed.   Additionally, the survey includes leading CMS platforms for the .NET market and Java WCM space. 

For a recap and summary of the survey, check out:

Joe Brockmeier's article Survey Says, featured on ReadWriteWeb.com (Nov 28).

Additionally, you can read Water & Stone's summary and download the report at:

2011 Open Source CMS Market Share Report (Nov. 11).