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.

So you're considering building a website and you may be feeling a little overwhelmed by it all. While this can easily happen it is wise to whip out some note paper and write down exactly what you want to achieve and what steps you need to take in order to get there.

So the first thing you are going to need to do is put the foundation in place. This will require extensive research. Now contrary to popular opinion I start this process a little bit differently than what is generally advised.

Now while we all know that you need to find a hungry market doing this can be a little more difficult than explained in actual fact that is just like everything else when it comes to doing anything online.

Actuality can be quite different from theory. So what I do is visit the article directories. I punch in a keyword that I am interested in and see what articles come up relative to that. Then I check the articles out to see how many page views they have received over a given period of time.

If an article receives a lot of page views then I know that there are a number of people looking for information relative to this subject. I also know that if I write an article on this topic that it will receive a lot of page views and as a result get a lot of click throughs to my site which will help me get traffic quickly without having to worry about what Google and everyone else does.

Next I visit the forums to see what solutions are being discussed then I go back to the articles and check what the writers are promoting and see if it is a valid good product to help people achieve the goals they desire. If so then I make note of it. Now I feel a little more confident about building a site around this theme.

The next thing you have to consider is the domain. A keyword in the domain is helpful but not essential. Your next quest is hosting. You need a good host as this is your life line.

Finally you want to be able to build the site effectively so as to achieve good search engine rankings. Keyword research relative to your overall theme will help you to do this plus you need to structure the pages properly so that you site can be understood by the search engines.

Do not worry if you lack technical knowledge as there are site builders out there to help you overcome this challenge.

Select any of the following links to watch some free videos.

This article will teach you how to make a web site even if you don't know any HTML, CSS or any other web design languages.

The easiest way to get a web site up and running with minimal experience is to use an online site builder. Online site builders are web building software that are hosted on the internet. They can be used by total newbies to build web pages with minimal technical knowledge.

Here are several reasons why you should consider using an online site builder to make a web site.

• WYSIWYG

  Online site builders offer you a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editing interface. This means that you need little or no html knowledge to begin using it. Everything is done visually. The site builder will then produce the necessary HTML code that will make up your website.

• Short learning curve

  With online site builders, you can put together a website in very short amount of time. The process of building a website using online site builders is very easy to understand. You just go through a series of steps and supply the site builder with the information it asks for and it will set everything up for you.

• One button click publishing

  One of the biggest problem a newbie has with making a web site is publishing it to the internet. With online site builders, you don't have to worry about messing with FTP software to upload your webpages. Often, all you need to do is click on a "Save" or "Publish" button and your website is live on the internet for all to see.

• Variety of predesigned layouts

  Most online site builders also comes with a variety of designs to choose from. This gives you that professional look instantly. Without you having to learn the fine points of creating great looking sites.

• Minimal requirements

  Since it's web based, all you need to use an online site builder is a web browser and an internet connection. You don't have to worry about downloading programs and installing them. You can access an online site builder from any computer and you will always have access to the latest features.

Now, how do you gain access to an online site builder?

Most good web host provide a basic site builder with their services. Though very basic, you can still make a decent web sites with it.

I would recommend you sign up for specialized site builder. These site builders specializes in building a specific type of website. You have online site builders that build content sites, some that build ecommerce sites and others that build multimedia sites. So, it really depends on what type of site you'd like to build.

Either way, online site builders are a great way for newbies to learn how to make a web site without any technical knowledge.