CMS or Forums?

As internet users we saw many websites. Many of them left behind the old fashion structure and took the new management of their pages. From these most used are forums and CMS website types. And yes, many blogs type sites appeared in last time. If you wanna start a website from scratch, what should you choose from? Of course, it depends on what you want to do with your site.

I WANT A BLOG

Ok, you want a blog to post your ideas, thoughts and share with other. This mean you need a small site structure, with few customization, easy setup, usage and maintenance. But in this point you need to make a decision: you are ready to support your blog or not? If you cannot afford paying host and domain for your blog, then you can choose start blogging free on platforms like wordpress.com, blogger.com. If you can handle costs of domain and host you can choose to run a free platform like wordpress to setup a new site by your own. I’ll give you some hints that will help you to take this decision faster.

If you choose free host and domain you must be aware to not have a straight domain name (will be a subdomain in fact), you will have less control on design and customization of site and even you cannot monetize it. But it is free at least. And is good for starters ones. On the other hand a paid host and domain have these advantages which free ones don’t have. In plus you have more control on your blog upgrades and updates. In fact, you have full control. So better way is to start experiencing blogging on free platforms and after you feel strong enough to handle your own blog, buy a new domain and host and start blog for real.

I WANT A FORUM

Why you want a forum? Because you want to open many discussions on some subjects and let community you have invited to your forum talk freely about that subjects. In this case it is ok, you need a forum. You don’t need a forum if you intend to have a presentation site, or business site. If you decide to use a forum site, you have to choose from some good forum platforms: Simple Machines Forum, Vbulletin, PhpBB and more other you can get using a search on net. Don’t forget this important information: if you want to create a community with more complex documents you maybe need a CMS site and not a forum.

WHY CMS?

CMS comes from content management system and is much more than a forum. It can be basically a forum, but have more complex management of its content. For example a CMS can have a good control of the flow of content which is more different than a forum post. The content of CMS can be an article or a page, a comment or a form. Well, a forum cannot handle so good such contents, but a CMS yes. So, you can try the next platforms of CMS and decide what is good for you: Ez Publish, Drupal, Joomla and so on. There are so many other CMS platforms, you only need to discover them, for exemple read from sites like Webappers.com or Siteground.com and compare until you find what you like.

Is not easy to decide fast what exactly you need for your website. In time some forums can be overwhelmed and need a considerable upgrade to stay fresh to community needs. Or someone can run a CMS website for few people and put them a lot of work for nothing when a blog is better for them. If you know well your needs you can make a good choice in the type of your website.