In Netvantage’s nearly 12 years of business, our staff has worked on numerous websites with a variety of content management systems (CMS). While some CMS are a breeze to work with, others are more difficult. Here are CMS we advise against:
 Adam Henige | Oh, I’m answering this one first because the correct answer is Joomla and I know several other people are going to copy me. I know people love this CMS, and it *can* work, but unless you grew up on this thing it’s not intuitive in any way shape or form to do even basic things as an SEO. Need to change meta descriptions? Good luck! Once you find them, unfortunately, you may not be able to change the page titles while you’re there. Everything is a wild goose chase when I work with this CMS and every installation and update seems to completely reconfigure where every element is. That, of course, is super fun when you’re trying to find an answer on Google and the answers might as well be describing how to set up an Apple IIe for the amount of relevance it has to the install of Joomla you’re looking at. |
 Jerod Karam | I’m going to take the cop-out answer here. They’re all terrible and they’re all decent (not great) in their own ways. The thing that really gets me is when the developers forget the basics. If you can’t easily change page titles or metadata then the CMS is a giant zero in my book. (That’s just one example. Another would be these proprietary hosting/website/CMS all-in-one packages that don’t allow users to edit themes or code.) WordPress, which is my favored CMS (just because I know it best), gets around this with plugins. Even that method isn’t the panacea that many think. I regularly deal with clients who can’t understand why their websites are running slowly and, upon investigation, I learn that they have 30 plugins installed. You just can’t run an efficient website with spaghetti code like that…and it allows the theme designers & developers to be lazy. So there’s no perfect answer to this question. My suggestion is to pick one CMS, learn it well, and figure out how to make it bend to you will. That’s about the best you can hope for. |
 Joe Ford | I will be the guilty party that copies Adam. Joomla is the one CMS that we encounter with clients that is always extremely difficult to use. I find it very clunky and it does not have a good inline editing option. Editing page titles and meta descriptions while not altering menu items is always difficult. In fact, most SEO related tasks are difficult. Additionally, trying to find and locate content in the general menu can be a tremendous challenge. In short, we cringe when prospective clients state that they use Joomla. |
 Lexie Kimball | I recently worked with the CMS MODX and I’m going to say it was interesting… The way the CMS was set up was very specific to the client, which was part of the issue, but there were a lot of hoops to jump through in order to be able to do page titles that didn’t also change the H1 and the menu title. At first, I chalked up the issues being that I was using a new platform, but as I continued working on it, I realized the CMS was the problem, not me. |
 Michael Hall | Sometimes I think that Content Management Systems are created with intentional design flaws so that website owners will be forever dependent on whatever businesses initially created their website. It’s all a big conspiracy I tell ya!! Anyway, I once worked on a website built in 1ShoppingCart, and that was a nightmare. It’s designed for e-commerce businesses and has a couple of nice perks if you sell a huge number of products. However, there was no control over so many factors critical for SEO. The order of products was displayed automatically, meaning you had add numbers to the product titles (and as a result of the page titles) if you wanted your high-margin products to be prominently displayed. Editing content was a royal pain as everything had to be edited in HTML. Good luck doing that if you if you’re a regular business owner who just wants to add a photo to a product page. 301 redirects? Forget about it. |
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