When choosing the best content management system for your project, it is important to weigh both the technical and non-technical pros and cons. Both technical and non-technical reasons can ultimately affect the bottom line cost. Therefore, it is not recommended to simply choose a content management system based solely on technical language or feature set. In this article, we will take a look at an open source content management system called Radiant CMS.

Radiant is a Ruby on Rails based solution that works with a variety of databases. It has a few years of development and a couple noteworthy deployments. There are technical and non-technical reasons why Radiant CMS is a good choice for a content management system.

Technical Reasons to Choose Radiant CMS: It's Ruby on Rails based which can speed development by taking advantage of the convention over configuration paradigm. In addition, the Radiant code base has excellent automated coverage in unit tests. This means the code is well tested and robust. Unit test code coverage can be one aspect to measure when considering open source content management systems. In fact, we could suggest the amount of code covered by automated unit and integration tests should be considered when choosing any open source library and/or framework. It is an easy indicator to measure and compare. But, that is an entirely different conversation.

Radiant CMS also has an excellent extension system. This allows customizations required by your project to be made. When choosing a content management system, the ability to add and maintain any customizations should be an important factor. This point should be considered not only from the beginning, but how your customizations will evolve as upgrades and enhancements occur within your chosen content management system. In other words, if the core CMS is modified to provide the custom functionality, how can upgrades or patches from the core CMS developers be applied to your modified version. Radiant's extension system provides this separation of concern.

The Radius tagging system of Radiant is fantastic for adding dynamic functionality. It is nice that tags can be added directly to page content rather than some kind of comment or special character sequence in order to indicate non-static content.

Non-Technical Reasons to Choose Radiant CMS: Radiant has an elegant, intuitive administrative interface. It is not intimidating to the non-technical user. In fact, the design encourages people to embrace using the system, because they assume it is going to be easy to pick up and learn.

The lack of workflow functionality can be considered a feature in many cases. In competing CMS products, workflow can seem like an attractive feature at first, but is often hindrance to configure and work around for projects which require only a few administrators of content.

An additional, non-technical reason to choose Radiant CMS is cost. The project is open source and the community of ruby on rails developers and ruby on rails hosting providers is growing, so your cost risk of obtaining these resources is minimized.

Conclusion

From a technical perspective, the open source, Ruby on Rails based Radiant CMS makes an excellent choice. From a non-technical perspective, Radiant CMS makes an excellent choice as well. When combining both perspectives, we have had many positive project experiences and deployments using Radiant over the past year and a half.

Website Accessibility means the website accessible to all the users in the web including visitors with disability. Many website owners know that their website is available in the internet for visitors to access information but possibly may not know whether their website is easily accessible and even be unaware about Disability Discrimination Act (DDA).

According to Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), all the business should make their services accessible to disabled users. There is also a section in DDA which addresses that if a business offers an online service, even the information is on a single page, then the business is responsible for making an effort to make this information accessible to disabled users.

All new websites that are designed and developed should now follow the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) against which the accessibility of the website is measured. But when the website is found isn't complaint, then anybody can sue you legally, if they want to.

By following these guidelines, you enhance the professional look of your website, provide access to visitors who previously had not no choice, thus increasing your business prospects and finally not to forget, your business is legal.

Some basic Guidelines to increase the accessibility of the visitors

Validate HTML and CSS: To check if the HTML and CSS used is valid, W3C validator can be used. It is necessary that websites are checked as the validator automatically tells you about any errors and accessibility issues in the web pages.

Image and alternative text: For browsers which don't support images, alternative text can be used to explain what the image is about as the user will only see the text.

Resize font text: Most of the internet browsers use Internet explorer to search for information. If the size of the text can be increased by choosing the font size to the largest then it means that your website is accessible to visitors.

Use of Java script: Websites are not easily accessible when java script is disabled. Mostly people have the java script support switched off, if that's the case then make sure that you use the Java script sensibly and unnoticeably.

Check for the following,

1. Website is accessible without the use of a mouse

2. Website has a Sitemap

3. Website has link text relevant to the content (blind users use tabbing while browsing websites from one link to the other)

Today more and more number of IT companies is outsourcing their web development services to developing countries like India. There are plenty of good quality outsourcing web development companies located in India and provide a ready resource of quality talent.

So why outsource?

There are many reasons why many a web development company in India has received lucrative outsourced projects from abroad. Most IT companies find that they incur greater cost savings by leveraging services from a web development company India. In addition to that most of the Indian software engineers possess a high quality of education and even language does not pose a problem as with other countries such as China etc.

Much more than cost savings!

There are several benefits an IT company can obtain by outsourcing its web development services to India. While earlier the main focus used to be on cost savings, today the reason India is a preferred outsourcing destination is because of the high caliber of talent here. The Indian standard of education is very high and hence the quality of engineering talent is also high.

Realization of ROI

By leveraging dedicated website development services in India, many foreign companies are finding tremendous benefits, not to mention an almost immediate realization of ROI. With dedicated timelines and strict adherence to project schedules product launches are made on time, with the result that the IT company can now begin to realize ROI that much faster.

Flexible engagement model

In addition many web site development company India are following a stringent and highly process oriented engagement model. That means that irrespective of whether the IT Company is a start up or a full fledged organization, the relative go to market timelines will be eventually accelerated.

Non-core issues handled

Apart from this several outsourcing web development companies also seek to undertake infrastructure issues. For example a regular ODC modeled company that also incubates the client's development facility will most often take care of tertiary issues like HR, legal aspects as well as recruitment functions. That also means that the IT company can now focus on only its core competencies as most tertiary aspects are handled by the outsourcing company in India!

Domain expertise

Many companies located in India specialize in dedicated niches of various industry verticals. That means that no matter what your niche is or what category your product belongs to, India can deliver high quality web development services. The engineers here possess a high quality of domain and technical expertise. India is preferred for outsourcing projects not just for cost savings but also for the quality of services offered.