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.

Creation of a website is not as simple as it used to be, thanks to Google and its innumerable algorithm changes. Surely, you want to create a website to carve an online presence. You could make the swankiest website, but if it does not receive eyeballs (aka traffic), it is worth little to you.

There are a lot of things to keep in mind before you set out to plan your website design, layout, content and other details. With the power of Google looming large over the Internet world, you could well be doomed if your site does not feature high in Google rankings. While Google rankings may not be your current concern, with the nuances of the website to take care of, it is advantageous to keep it in mind while deciding your site layout, content and coding language. More on that in the next article. Lets deals with simple non-technical stuff first.

While many people build websites to please the search engines, do not ignore your human visitors completely. Remember, they are your primary audience. You need to find the right balance, make your website meet the requirements of both.

Your website should have a specific goal. It could be to create an online presence, provide information, make money, generate leads, or just about anything. Next, you need to chalk out a plan for the development of the website. Be aware of the target audience. The audience could be local, international, young, old, men or women, students, professionals. Once you know the segment of people you want to attract, you will find it easier to decide upon the layout, color scheme, tone of language etc. This is because you will then orient your website design to suit your target audience's tastes.

Design a layout that enables the eye to naturally move from one information segment to another effortlessly taking them to the desired part of the website. This could be a signup form, a set of testimonials, a particular product or simply an advertisement.

Choose a good brandable name. This helps in the long run. Create good original content that provides all the necessary information to the audience. Add appropriate images to add to the appeal and beauty of the page. It is advisable to use a good CMS (Content Management System) so that things are easier in the long run. Adding, modifying and deleting pages are a breeze with a good CMS.

Keep your page light to improve loading time. Choose lighter images over heavier ones. After all, YOU will be paying for the bandwidth.

A great idea is to check out how your competitors have designed their websites. If the research has already been done by someone else, make use of it. Do not reinvent the wheel. Focus on improving upon the wheel design.

This has covered the basics. In the next article, we can talk about important onpage optimization aspects to keep in mind while designing your website. You will need to do this if you are hoping to receive traffic from the Search Engines.

You can either take your time to learn the nuances of website design, onpage optimization and Internet Marketing yourself, or you can hire a website design company, depending on what your time is worth. Either ways, it is highly recommended that you begin preparing for the online competition from day one.

As the Internet continues to grow in popularity and billion of users access it a day endlessly surfing one website to another, a relatively small but significant percentage of those people are creating their very own websites. Statistically, there is an average of one hundred thousand new websites per day. With so many websites being created per day and so many more potential visitors to attract, to know just how many visitors your website is pulling is important to know for any webmaster. That's where a good performing, reliable and dependable website counter comes into play. No one wants to be given bad information and having a website counter that generates inaccurate data will do just that.

So which website counters are reliable? Which ones are dependable and trustworthy? Well now that you know that not every website counter is worth placing on your website, to find a good one you must look the company or the organization that created the website counter. There are many website counters that are created by no name, incredible people, companies and organizations. Just because those people offer a website counter for free, does not mean that it is reliable. It could be just free junk. Look at the website, the company, the people who are offering the website counter and make a judgment call on whether it is wise to use their website counter. A free website counter should not automatically make you want to use it. So what is the best website counter? One of the most reliable and most trustworthy website counters available so far is the Google Analytics service.

Google Analytics is the best website counter because it is very reliable, dependable and trustworthy. It will give you accurate data and it is very user friendly. Its no coincidence that Google Analytics is owned and operated by Google incorporated. If you didn't know, Google is a search engine and so much more. Google is one of the most wealthiest and credible corporations on the planet Earth. With billions of dollars rushing into their wallets per year, Google is a massive empire with worldwide respect. So with so much at stake, will Google risk their respect by creating an average service such as Google Analytics? No, if they are going to create a service available for the general public, then they are going to give it their best. With billions at their disposal and endless resources, Google is more than capable of creating an amazing service. Google Analytics is also so much more than a mere website counter, capable is of giving you various stats at a click of a mouse.

How long on average are your visitors staying on your website? Don't know? Google Analytics can tell you that a so much more. In fact with so much information, Google Analytics can get slightly confusing. But with a dedicated support team just waiting for your questions, Google Analytics quickly propels itself into a legendary service. Also with full video tutorials like GlyticVideos, anyone can master the Google Analytics service overnight. Ah and I almost forgot, did you know that Google Analytics is 100% absolutely free? But to be able to fully use Google Analytics you have to master the service. That's where GlyticVideos comes in. After that, all I can say is, checkmate.