Introduction to CMS
Your Content Management System (CMS) is the chassis of your content marketing campaign. A content management system (CMS) is an application that allows you to create and run your website. There is an interface, an admin panel where you can design and update pages, posts. You can also arrange the content the way you want. CMS provides a reliable, protected and user-friendly interface to handle the contents of the database. CMS plays a crucial role in communicating your content to the target market. There is no benefit in having exceptional content if your CMS is incapable of handling it well.

Factors to consider the choice of CMS platform
While choosing a CMS platform, one must keep in mind the various factors involved. A decision is taken after analysing all the elements in detail.

● Impact on business
The effect that a CMS platform will have on the market requires in-depth analysis. The requirements vary for every organisation. Some CMS platforms are better in funnelling the leads, while specific CMS platforms like WordPress are better at showcasing the products, and help in marketing the products. If massive operations are required for the growth of the business, Drupal is the best choice.

● Cost incurred
The cost involved in maintaining a CMS varies from one to the other. Some CMS platforms like WordPress and Drupal are open-source platforms and are free to use. However, there are costs involved in buying plugins to customise the website as per your requirements. Other

CMS platforms like Sitecore and Kentico have paid plans and have more features. The point is to decide on your budget and needs before choosing to invest money on a CMS platform.

● Requirements of the platform
Different platforms have different types of server requirements. Also, some platforms might not be compatible with your existing technology stack. Launching a website is only the start. The need for regularly maintaining it is a significant point for consideration.

● Blogging
With the boom in content marketing, blogging has become a significant part of an organization’s growth. The CMS must handle blog posts well. The main factors to look for, while looking at the blogging aspect are:
1. User-friendly interface for writers with low technical skills
2. Smooth workflow management, and post scheduling options
3. Social Media Integrations
4. Availability of automation options

● Customisation
The ability to customise the CMS platform is the main pain point. Some CMS platforms do not offer personalization. Some platforms provide limited customisation with access to the codes, while some are fully customisable. YSIWYG is a trending factor. It means ‘What You See Is What You Get.’ It helps the designers to make visually appealing customisations.

● SEO and Marketing
Some CMS platforms offer built-in SEO modules. Also, a clean, customizable code is necessary for SEO. It is a form of art that takes in constant practice. Choosing the right CMS, such as WordPress will go a long way in driving organic traffic for your website. The ease of integration of marketing tools into your CMS is a central point of consideration. Various marketing tools, like Hubspot and Mailchimp, integrate well with WordPress.

● Support and Scalability
A CMS platform that provides constant support and training is the best choice. It is necessary to have a platform that supports scaling whenever you feel the need to expand. While planning for the current requirements, it is wise to anticipate future demands and prepare accordingly to scale. CMS platforms like Sitecore and Kentico offer scalability options.

Pros and Cons of each CMS

● WordPress
Pros:
Drupal is a free and open-source platform.
The plugins for WordPress are simple to use and are useful for SEO.
Wordpress has an excellent blogging option.
Strong performance due to minimal code and PHP.

Cons:
Prone to hacking and malware.
It requires planning of the website.
Hard to use custom layouts.

● Drupal
Pros:
Drupal is a free and open-source platform.
Drupal has options for easy scalability. It can be scaled as per the fluctuations in the traffic.
Drupal has flexible taxonomies that offer vast flexibility.
Multilingual functionality is built into the core of Drupal.
Drupal has robust security features.

Cons:
Drupal requires you to have strong coding skills and is relatively complicated to use.
Drupal has performance issues. The user has to put a lot of effort to improve the configurations.
Compatibility issues between the modules arise sometimes.

● Joomla!
Pros:
Joomla! is a free and open-source platform.
Joomla! has limited compatibility issues because it is scripted entirely in PHP.
Joomla! has an easy user interface which makes it adaptable and flexible.

Cons:
Joomla! is complicated to customise without coding knowledge.
Joomla! has limited availability of modules due to the small user base.

● Sharepoint
Pros:
Sharepoint has a lot of options for customisation and is highly customisable.
Sharepoint is integrated with Microsoft Office and can save a lot of time during collaboration.
Sharepoint allows you to build multiple layers of sites and create enterprising solutions for large organisations.

Cons:
The licence of Sharepoint is expensive, and it costs a lot to set it up and maintain it.
Sharepoint requires training to use it and isn’t intuitive.

● Sitecore
Pros:
Sitecore is a powerful platform with a great deal of flexibility.
Sitecore features support Enterprise-level requirements.
It is easy to use for non-developers.

Cons:
Sitecore has performance issues at times and becomes slow.
Sitecore is expensive for basic CMS needs.

● Kentico
Pros:
Kentico is easy to use, versatile, and robust.
Kentico supports scalability.
Kentico has constant updates where the features increase consistently.

Cons:
Kentico is expensive for general users.
It generally takes time to implement features in Kentico.

Conclusion
It’s hard to find a perfect CMS, and it’s easy to get lost in the number of choices. There are about 250 to 350 different applications available in the market. From simple building tools to expansive enterprise systems, the possibilities are endless. The question is what CMS requirements you will need to support your planned online project optimally.

Choosing the right CMS platform for your Business can be confusing or may leave you with too many choices. So, how do you make sure you are choosing the right one? Well, no matter which CMS platform you choose whether its Joomla, WordPress or Drupal they are all equally great. What can be achieved in one can be achieved in another. The only difference we see between them from a web development company’s point of view is the User Experience.

Upon asking our clients about their preferability, they all have one thing in common “The WordPress”. The reason? WordPress has a great User Experience and is a lot easier for our clients to grab on. They have no difficulty using it. Though, all our clients are active Web Masters. Constantly making content updates to their website.

If User Experience is not an only deciding factor for you then here’s a short comparison between the three widely used CMS platforms by our developer that will help you choose the right CMS platform for your business.

Joomla
Joomla! is a free and open-source content management system for publishing web content, developed by Open Source Matters, Inc. It is built on an MVC web application framework that can be used independently of the CMS.

Some of the core features Joomla offers:

• Ease of use – User Experience is cluttered
• Features – more suitable for community platform
• One click install – yes
• Number of plugins available – 32000+ modules
• eCommerce – yes
• SEO friendly – basic SEO
• Developer cost – $25-$50 per hour
• Easy to customize – requires an advanced level of programming knowledge
• Dedicated hosting available – yes
• easy to maintain – requires AMC

WordPress
WordPress is a widely used CMS platform with over 30% of the websites running on WordPress. WordPress was started as a blogging platform. Today, WordPress is preferred as a CMS platform capable of handling complex websites.

Some core features offered by WordPress:

• Ease of use – great user experience
• Features – best for small business websites
• One click install – yes
• Number of plugins available – 45000+ plugins
• eCommerce – yes
• SEO friendly – advance SEO
• Developer cost – $15-$30 per hour
• Easy to customize – plugins available for all kind of customizations
• Dedicated hosting available – yes
• Easy to maintain – requires AMC

Drupal
Drupal is most suitable for large and complex websites. It is the second most popular CMS platform, powering 8% of the websites. It’s extremely powerful and less resource intensive.

Some core features offered by Drupal:

• Ease of use – requires technical expertise
• Features – best suitable for enterprise-level Business
• One click install – yes
• Number of plugins available -7000+ extensions
• eCommerce – yes and no
• SEO friendly – good SEO
• Developer cost – $25-$50 per hour
• Easy to customize – an advance level of programming knowledge is required
• Dedicated hosting available – yes
• Easy to maintain – requires AMC

As a WordPress development company from India, whenever we have a proposal for our clients with a recommendation of using WordPress as a CMS platform, we have a question that is being asked by our clients, is WordPress secure?

To figure out what is the best way to answer the question and to explain why WordPress is recommended, how powerful and user-friendly CMS platform it is, and how it can be secured by installing right plugins and following basic provisions we decided to write a Blog.

We thought writing a blog would be a good idea on this topic. So, whenever we have the question being asked, we can simply share this blog post with our clients to guide them and to educate them on how their WordPress website can be secured.

Here are some tips from our WordPress Experts on how to keep your WordPress website secure and away from the bad boys.

Never set admin as username:
first and foremost, never use admin or your company name as a username. Using common usernames can put you at risk. Be creative, try different usernames that aren’t easy to guess. Set uncommon usernames. To find out how to delete the default admin user account please go to our blog post at How To Delete “Admin” WordPress’s Default User Account?

Change the Database prefix:
WordPress uses wp_ prefix for its database table names by default. Using default database prefix can let the hackers easily guess the full name of any database table. You can change the database prefix to something else while installing the WordPress.

Be protected, Install a Firewall:
This is the best and easiest way to prevent your WordPress website from hacking attacks. As of today, Sucuri is one of the best Firewall paid plugin available for WordPress CMS out there. If you aren’t willing to spend and still want your website to be protected then we recommend using Wordfence’s free plugin available at WordPress repository. This plugin is powerful enough to protect your website from almost all sorts of hacking attacks. Configuring Wordfence is very easy and straightforward.

Keep your website backed up: 
Even though we have taken all the necessary measures to keep the WordPress website secured, we can never be 100% sure that nothing bad will happen. Hackers are smart and one step forward in planning. Having a regular backup of your website can help you restore it quickly if there has been an irreversible damage done by the hackers.

This is clearly a subjective sphere and without doubt, users will be attracted to websites which are special or just that little bit different from the next one on the list. Annoyingly enough, users also what to know that the layout of site A is not radically different from that of site B. Visitors need to know what to expect in terms of layout and navigation when they are extracting information from the web.

Website Navigation

Einstein famously said that if you cannot explain your findings to a non-specialist (he referred to his grandmother), then you have not properly understood them. How many times have you gone to a meeting and come out of it none the wiser to what was actually discussed or what your obligations are? The point here is that website navigation should be as ordered and simple as you can make them. If you overload your homepage with offers and/or icons visitors the website will appear confusing and disorganized. Additionally, making your website appear to be hip or fashionable gives an impression of contrivance. Either way, people are likely to be put off and look elsewhere. The answer is to blend your quality information with practical or useful information which is presented in a way which appeals to users. Finally, your links should aid user navigation and be able to improve the ranking of your site by engines.

Advertising and images

Most of us recognize that some sort of advertising represents a source of essential revenue and depending on your point of view are ambivalent as to the validity of its presence. Within this frame, the advertising itself should distract people from website content. So, as obvious as it sounds the placement and size of any adverts (particularly if they are animated) need to fit within the overall architecture of the website and not the other way around.

Images are essential to websites design and functionality, relevant images are not a problem when a website is being constructed. Having said this if the load time for your website is compromised because there are too many images, your website will clearly not enjoy sustained traffic. This eventuality can be stopped by placing any extra images into a purpose-built and well- presented image gallery. Have one image embedded in the content and three which relate to it in the gallery.

Ease up on the text.

Doubtless, there are academic, specialist and news sites where visitors know they are going to see the latest research and reportage presented in the form of primary or secondary literature which may be filled with industry-specific terms. However, outside of this frame and especially in mobile applications the last thing any user wants is to be reading through pages of text. The idea is to have short punchy paragraphs and or bullet points with images that are both relevant and engaging.  In short, the last thing you want is pages to be overburdened with wordy and/or irrelevant text. In other words, images beget impact text does not!

Software and navigation need to be standardized and user-friendly so that people spend time actually working on the website as opposed to deducing what they have clicked and what a particular feature actually does.

The single biggest change, (some say that everything else is insignificant), is the gravitation toward ensuring that websites are compatible with the burgeoning numbers of mobile devices. In the few years leading up to 2016, the need for responsive web design and the emergence of HTML5 has underpinned this emergence and steered the entire industry in entirely new directions where design and code need to be compatible with both PC’s and portable devices. The latter is becoming increasingly more relevant in terms of numbers of users and therefore overall traffic.

The emergence of mobile Applications:

Without a doubt, the emergence of devices such as tablets has catalyzed (along with the influence of Android and iOS design) and reinvigorated the whole web development process. The emergence of smartphones and other portable devices has meant that a smooth web interface is now sacrosanct whether the device is mobile or not. The objective is to now replicate the portable experience on a PC or laptop, in other words, the overall design and how we use our hardware is being driven by the mobile experience. The more seamless the navigation the better

Intertwined with these developments is the emergence of increasingly higher screen resolutions and touchscreen technology (for many users this is a mixed blessing) which applies equally to portable and stand-alone setups.  As this facet of the technology becomes more refined and sophisticated users can expect the purely visual aspects of their online experience to be delivered with continually improved clarity. For web developers and programmers, this is crucial because people will be increasingly able to see and comment on even the most minor discrepancy. Taken collectively websites will continue to evolve into a more mobile and application focused medium for information exchange.

Browsers and Operating Systems

Over the last 18 months, both Google and Firefox have released their hugely popular browsers as operating systems in their own right. For people, this means they have a choice as to how they set up their whole online and computing experience. As innovation continues and languages such as HTML5 expand users can expect the best experience that the technology can offer directly from their browser. In addition, no extra plug-ins or downloads are needed and the highest standards are necessary to drive the overall digital interaction.

Getting the go-lives right

In today’s information age companies, brands and organizations will continue to ensure that their go-lives are a faultless and therefore successful experience. Web development is the overall behind the scenes process that ensures this eventuality. When mistakes happen they become inculcated into both the public and industry consciousness, meaning that the importance of web development has become more apparent. This means that the go-live launch date will be increasingly be used as an opportunity for agencies to demonstrate the importance they place on the nuts and bolts of their daily operations. In summary, you can have all the PR and promotion in the world but if your launch is an unmitigated disaster your reputation is sure to suffer.

Fonts and mobile web development

Portable devices have smaller screens than PC’s and laptops, therefore a key focus for future web development will be the overall layout of content and text font size. This will have a profound impact on overall website design and is one of the key components of responsive web design. Certain brands have even gone as far as to design their own fonts for their applications and websites

The future of web development is overwhelmingly going to be application driven; this does not mean that people will stop using their PC’s just that they no longer dominate. It means that the requirements of users who use mobile devices will supersede those of the laptop and PC user.

HTML 5 is the latest incarnation of the hypertext markup programming language and since its release in 2011 its popularity has ballooned. The most important reason for this surge is because it can function in different browsers and between platforms with no need for plug-ins or extra downloads. A recent survey of over 2000 business who use open source applications has established that not is HTML5 enjoying massive popularity but its utility is expanding:

60% of developers have migrated to HTML5

This statistic demonstrates that almost unprecedented brand loyalty to the platform has been established in such a short space of time. In addition of this 60% over 70% of HTML5 developers report that they are doing more with the new platform than they were the previous year and this figure looks set to rise to over 75% in 2014. These figures are augmented by assertions that only 4% plan to work less with HTML5 in 2014. In addition as the numbers gravitating to HTML5 is predicted to continue rising the less development is planned to occur with native technologies.

The Microsoft connection

Today the either or support of windows or iPhones are well and truly distant and fading. Over half of developers now support mobile and desktop devices as the primary source for the applications they produce. On average a developer will today support five different devices, less than 20% of developers only target mobile devices and for desktop devices, the figure is approximately 30%.

In desktop applications micro-soft currently enjoys dominance in terms of targeted application development but this masks the fact (at least according to the report) that 30% of developers have withdrawn their support. It also appears that many Microsoft mobile devices are subject to some of the most pronounced testing gaps for apps in the entire web development industry. Intertwined with such realities is the fact that Typescript, the latest scripting language from Microsoft has been less than well received by the industry.   The future is as far as Microsoft is concerned is less than 100% guaranteed.

Diversity of devices

Having said all of the this the most popular set up that developers utilize as platforms for their applications is the standard PC and laptop set up. However, Android and iPhone/iPad follow with 60% and 50% targeting respectively.  These figures mask the difference between supporting and testing, where the former is box-ticking exercise where developers can say they support a particular platform without taking any active participation in their application on that platform. The biggest gap between testing and supporting lies with iPod and Windows portable devices, such as mobiles and tablets. Organisations such as Microsoft ought to be anxious due to the discrepancy between actual testing of applications on their devices and the levels of actual endorsement for them. This is particularly pertinent given the dissemination and diversity of devices which support applications which are targeted specifically to mobile and desktop devices as developers require.

Is HTML5 the future?

Data collated from the survey suggests that the majority of developers have already migrated to HTML5 with over 46% using technology delivered directly from the browser, with an additional 15% focusing entirely on mobile hybrid technology.  The survey has drawn out theta the main reasons for developing with HTML % are:

• You can continue to use your existing base of web-based development attributes and parameters
• You can continue to use single programming language and code to reach your users so that you can reach users and the application concerned can continue to enjoy maximum exposure.
• Ease of use begets increased productivity especially were web development technology is paramount.

In summary HTML5 has had a profound impact and looks set to continue to radically overhaul the mechanisms by which web development progresses.

There is an overwhelming case for RWD, organizations need to ensure that their websites are accessible from and compatible with different devices (mobile or PC). The case is simple new websites need to be accessible in this way as standard and older websites, (those developed before 2010) need to be overhauled so that they too are accessible from the latest tablet. In this context, it is not surprising that a whole new RWD industry has sprung up in the wake of the popularity of portable devices. With RWD a person can continue with their research, business transactions or even work when they are away from their PC or laptop. Effective RWD ensures that one website can be accessed and used with the same degree of finesse and ease no matter the device it is loaded into.

Managing one website

Mobile versions of websites have been around for many years this is no longer sufficient, purely because there are other types of portable devices. A website that has been designed responsively is in effect a central point for content and information because the organization only needs to manage one website. This also applies to marketing and search engines. There is only one marketing strategy and you don’t need to analyze traffic to multiple websites (which affects overall ranking). RWD means that a particular website will appear higher in a search engine ranking than one which is not. Put simply search engines find it easier to change algorithms and index content for websites that can be accessed equally from multiple devices. A responsively designed website will be more exposed than one which is not.

PC and laptop no longer dominates

Depending on the precise analytics in 2014 websites receive up to 50% (in some cases more) of their traffic from portable devices. If the website has not been developed with RWD in mind then it will not be meeting the expectations of those mobile users. The trend is rising inexorably and although it is highly unlikely that PC and laptops will fall by the wayside, the reality is that they will no longer dominate. Taken collectively the use of mobile devices is arguably the single biggest driver behind RWD. In short, if you’re not employing RWD you’re effectively losing traffic because people cannot access your website in the numbers that they should be.

No doubt about it RWD is the future

RWD is undeniably in its early stages and is by no means perfect but it does indicate the direction the web development industry is moving. RWD will enable tools and applications to become further integrated, interactive and accessible from an increasingly wider range of devices. The internet is continually evolving and as RWD becomes the norm for web development more products, services, tools and applications will become integrated into multiple devices. RWD seeks to ensure that all applications and the overall interface are clear and accessible from all devices. This will remove the need for specialist coding that needs to accommodate different screen resolutions.

The point is that RWD is here and will continue to expand and as such with everyone else employing it you will need to as well.

Usually, you can add, edit and delete users and passwords from the back-end User Manager. To do this, you must be logged in as a member of the Super Administrator group. In certain situations, this may not be possible. For example, your site may have been “hacked” and had the passwords or users changed. Or perhaps the person who knew the passwords is no longer available. Or maybe you have forgotten the password that was used.

In these cases, it is still possible to fix the problem in the Joomla database so you can log back in as a Super Administrator.

Change the Password in the Database

If the admin user is still defined, the simplest option is to change the password in the database to a known value. This requires that you have access to the MySQL database using phpMyAdmin or another client.

1. Navigate to phpMyAdmin and select the database for the Joomla site in the left-hand side drop-down list box. This will show the database tables on the left side of the screen.
2. Click on the table “jos_users” in the list of tables (note: you may have a prefix that is not jos_, simply go to the _users table for your prefix).
3. Click on the “Browse” button in the top toolbar. This will show all of the users that are set up for this site.
4. Find the user whose password you want to change and press the Edit icon for this row.
5. A form will display that allows you to edit the password field. Copy the value

d2064d358136996bd22421584a7cb33e:trd7TvKHx6dMeoMmBVxYmg0vuXEA4199

Into the password field and press the Go button. phpMyAdmin should display the message “Affected rows: 1”. At this point, the password should be changed to “secret”.

Log in with this user and password and change the password of this user to a secure value. Check all of the users using the User Manager to make sure they are legitimate. If you have been hacked, you may want to change all of the passwords on the site.

Do you have broken website URLs? Is it costing you to let your traffic land on dead pages? If YES, we have good news for you.

We recently revamped and migrated a website to a WordPress CMS. The website had several pages crawling in organic search. The guys have worked really hard to get the pages listed in the organic search. We did not want their efforts to go in Vain.

As a web development company, we could have redirected it by modifying .htaccess file, but we wanted to keep it easy for the client to manage in future. So as always we started searching for a plug-in library on WordPress. After going through a whole lot of plug-in’s, we got hold of this amazing plug-in called “Redirection”, as simple as it sounds. Download it from http://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/

Once downloaded, Install it, go to settings and create the Source and Targeted URL with Type: Simple Redirection and 301 Method. Source URL is the broken URL from Google and the targeted URL is the URL you want your user redirected to. Aint it really easy? Hope this post saves your time!

In the older versions of WordPress, you had no option to change WordPress’s default username “Admin” to something else during the installation procedure. This has been changed from Version 3.0 and higher. So if you are still using the older version of WordPress, how do you actually change the default username from Admin to something you like?

Here are some very easy steps,

1. Login to your WordPress admin
2. Under dashboard click Users > Add New (you will find it under the left side navigation)
3. Name your new user and set a strong password. Generate one with Strong Password Generator if you can’t come up with one on your own.
4. Under Role select Administrator.
5. Click Add New User button to finish adding a new user.
6. Now log out and re-login with the new user account. The one you just created.
7. Again under Dashboard click Users > All Users, it will show you a list of current users.
8. Roll over on Admin and hit Delete
9. If you have blog posts written for this account, it will ask you to attribute the posts to the other account. Please select a new user for Attribute ‘all posts to’ and hit confirm the deletion.

The default user Admin is now deleted and is no longer available for the bad boys to hack.