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.

With billions upon billions of people on the Earth and an estimated fifty seven million square miles of land, who would have thought that it would be possible to interact with virtually every single person from the comfort of your home or office. No, I'm not talking about talking to them over the phone or writing to them by mail but being able to interact with them via the Internet. Now more than ever, more and more people own computers with Internet connections and are surfing the web.

With billions of Internet users jumping from site to site, there will be those that will stumble upon your website. The question is, do you know anything about those website visitors? Are you getting detailed reports about your web visitors? If not, then as a webmaster you need to seek out the proper website visitor tracking software.

One that will be able to tell you everything about your visitors, like what they're doing when they visit your site or how long they are staying on your website? What links are they clicking? All these questions and more need to be answered. So if you are going to use a visitor tracking software, you might as well use the best. Provided by the advertising behemoth Google incorporated, Google Analytics is just the tool to use.

Google is a multi-billion dollar company that has resources to craft an excellent website visitor tracking software for all webmaster everywhere. This versatile services has an array of features including fast implementation, geo-targeting, customizable dashboards and more. The best part about Google Analytics is that its free. Any and every webmaster can afford the service. So if you are looking for a website visitor tracking software, I highly recommend Google Analytics.

If you are wondering why it is important to keep track of your website visitors, here are few reasons why. First, if you know important information like what your top exit pages are, then you can optimize those pages to preserve your traffic. Secondly, if you have ads on your website, you can use the site overlay feature to see what links your visitors tend to click on the most and reposition those links and place ads there to increase your ad revenue exponentially.

You see, Google Analytics can provide you with tons of valuable information. Information which can increase the productivity and effectiveness of your website. But I must say that there may be some what of a learning curve to the service. You may need to visit the Google help center or watch high quality training videos from programs like GlyticVideos. Once you've gotten a great understanding of Google Analytics, then you can fully utilize and get the most out of the service.

Every one of us wants to create a successful website. No one wants to fail. As a consequence of this many of us are out there looking for the silver bullet. Now to me the silver bullet lies within you. You are the key to your success. Of course this sounds nice but how can it be applied in practical terms?

Firstly you like anyone else go online to seek solutions. Your idea right now is that you want to make money. So you are going to search out opportunities that enable you to achieve this.

As a result of this you are going to come across a lot of information and the information that seems the most believable to you is the one you will choose to obtain. However there is also another element at play and that is emotion. The site that outlines the benefits that speak best to your emotional desires will be the one that you approve.

To build a successful website you can use yourself as the model. In other words when people visit your site are you going to outline the benefits that speak to their emotional desires and furthermore will you provide proof by helping them to connect the dots which will make it believable for them that they can reach the goal that they desire to reach.

If your website is built in this way where you genuinely help others achieve their objective then your site will be naturally successful. It really is as simple as that but that does not mean that the work will not be challenging because it will - but if you are determined and build you site with the visitor in mind then the rest is history.