There are a lot of reasons you might want to start a website. It is a great way to communicate with friends & family, and it is a great way to meet new people online and create conversations on the internet. Whether you have an idea or belief you want to promote, or a product you would like to sell, a personal or business website can be the solution to your marketing and communication goals. These days, a lack of technical knowledge doesn't have to be a barrier to getting started.

The good news is you don't need a degree in programming to start a new website. You don't even need to know a single line of code for that matter! If you can install software packages through a web-browser interface, you can set up a Content Management System (CMS) that will allow you to design, create, and manage any number of pages, articles, and stories. Some web hosts even have utilities like Fantastico that will automatically install a variety of Content Management Systems from blogs, to forums, to picture galleries or e-commerce websites.

Content Management Systems not only give websites more interactivity and functionality, they also allow people with few technical skills to get up and running with an online presence. The most popular ones like WordPress, Simple Machine Forums, phpBB, and Joomla are all free to use with varying regulations on how you can modify or transfer use of the software. Each of the programs also has discussion communities built around them where new and experienced users share advice & knowledge with the most common errors and user requests. If a problem pops up, there is a good chance that someone has already posted a step-by-step solution to it somewhere on the web.

As easy as it is to create and initially customize a new website, there is also no limit in how far you can take it. As you install easy to use CMS packages, some of the vocabulary will become a little more familiar and you'll naturally find yourself a little more comfortable with the technical aspects of your new hobby. So long as you keep regular back ups, you can confidently learn new skills by trial and error.

Depending on where you want to take your business, a multiple niche website can be an excellent platform with which to expand your business and cover a larger market. It could also be a good choice for you if your interests and expertise vary greatly. However, you also have a choice to just focus all your energies on building one site and staking your reputation on it. So will a multiple niche website be a good choice or will one big authority site increase your chances of success? Let's take a look at the benefits and limitations of each option:

Multiple Niche Websites:

A multiple niche website offers you an opportunity to reach several different segments of the market all at once, allowing you to cover as much ground as you can using just one or a few sites.

Advantages

A multiple niche website lets you communicate to multiple groups of potential customers and possibly close a business transaction from there. It also helps maximize your initial website building efforts, particularly because you only need to build each site around a single design concept.

Multiple niche websites can also showcase your flexibility and comprehensiveness of services that you offer. It's like having a multi-specialty site that attracts clients and customers from several different market segments and then doing business with them. Once your site has been around for sometime, it could easily pick up a minimum of 1,000 to 3,000 hits per day - even more when you've gained enough reputation and recognizability in the business.

Disadvantages

The disadvantage of a multiple niche website rests mainly on its design. Since you will be promoting different products and/or services from a single site, imagine how it would look like to a visitor. One site = hundreds of related links. And we're not just talking about internal links either.

A multiple niche website is essentially your store from which you'll be running your business. Once you're actively participating in the industry, it shouldn't be long until you find external links that you might want to refer to your visitors. Now imagine the chaos - dozens of links, banners, buttons, ads, graphics, pages upon pages, all coming from just one direction, each one crying out for attention.

If you can't manage it well, a multiple niche website can grow to be a multi-headed monster, each one heading for a different direction and demanding a different type of approach. In the end, there is a danger that you could be competing with no one else but yourself.

Build multiple niche websites if...

- You have the expertise and the experience in the specific niches you want to focus on.

- You have the skills, time or manpower to devote for the development of each niche.

- You have the resources to spend for the demands that a multiple niche site will require.

- You have established an organized and well-designed business processing system to handle transactions such as sales, discounting, customer service, subscription, etc.

- You have the patience of a saint and the eye for detail of an IRS auditor.

Single Authority Site

The single authority site is just that - one site offering excellent products or services pertaining to a single niche or industry.

Advantages

One big authority site is perfect for people who want to build their expertise in only one field or niche. If there's one thing you can do well and you want to make it your business, take this route. It's easy to set up, doesn't require a lot of resources and is relatively cheaper to run. You could also concentrate all your efforts here and become a respected guru in a specific field instead of being the internet marketer who juggles with multiple industries and never quite achieving expert status.

Disadvantages

If you made a mistake in your choice of niche, a single authority site can fizzle out like a short matchstick. When it goes, it goes and there's nowhere else you can turn to or fall back on, unlike a multiple niche website where there are other things going on for you.

You could also miss the opportunity of providing products and services for a wider market segment, thus limiting your income potential. If the niche you chose has a limited market, your site's traffic counter will reflect that in the number of hits it receives.

Build one big authority site if...

- Your expertise is limited to only one area and you are confident you can comfortably grow in it.

- You want to become a known authority in that niche.

- You have limited knowledge or training.

- You want to focus all your time, effort and money developing one big authority site versus a multiple niche website.

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.