Launching various sites on different content management systems provides valuable lessons for anyone wanting to build a larger and more robust Web site.

Content sites should be built on a CMS for several important reasons. A CMS will save staff time from coding pages, provide rich functionality such as search, display consistent templates that don’t confuse site visitors and make it much easier to implement changes that affect numerous pages.

Three types of CMS platforms are available: commercial, open source and customized. Commercial systems such as ExpressionEngine have fees ranging greatly depending on the size of the site, functional requirements, amount of technical support and other factors. Free, open-source CMS platforms including Drupal, Joomla and Zope come with no support other than community message boards. A custom system usually is built upon parts of other platforms, most often open source.

Here are some primary considerations in making a choice among the three options:

1. Price: balancing limited budgets with capabilities that grow audience and revenue

2. Technical support: staff versus outsourced

3. Training and documentation: strongest with commercial, weakest with open source

4. Usability: Is it intuitive or easy to use for staff with limited technical skills?

5. Productivity: Make sure the time savings in the long run exceed the effort needed to launch.

It is important to keep in mind that different content systems have different strengths and weaknesses.

On the positive side, a CMS such as ExpressionEngine is inexpensive ($250 for a comemrcial license), provides some obligatory technical support through message boards and has a rich set of site features that are especially good for content sites, including flexible templates, easy publishing, email newsletters and robust search. It requires little maintenance effort once the site is built.

On the negative side, EE takes a great deal of upfront labor because of the numerous templates that have to be built if the site design requires flexible templates. It has a unique tagging system on top of the standard HTML that is not very intuitive.

In the case of sites we have built in EE, the positives have outweighed the negatives.

In contrast, an open-source system such as Joomla or Drupal is free, is easy to set up and launch, and has numerous add-ons created by other developers. But the negatives include weak documentation, security issues and no support other than community message boards. If something goes wrong, you are painfully on your own.

Finally, a customized system has the greatest potential for giving you what you want exactly the way you want it. But it has great upfront labor costs, and if the prime architect of the system leaves, you are left with the difficult task of finding and training the replacement.