Choosing a CMS, or Content Management System, for your site is like choosing a house. You want something that:

1.    Meets your needs right now; easily expanded later  
2.    Is affordable
3.    Meets your needs
4.    You can find help when you need it
5.    And finally, did I mention, it meets your needs?

CMS solutions are, at their core, a means to an end. That end is ease of updating your site, organizing your information, and giving the end user an intuitive, consistent and satisfying user experience.

We recently completely rebuilt The Dell Lounge to be a fully dynamic, social networking, CMS-driven site. In doing so we had to evaluate several different options for our platform. We ended up choosing from three packages: Community Server Professional Edition, Graffiti CMS Server Edition, and Kentico CMS Enterprise Edition. All three solutions are extremely capable options and we’ve in fact used them all for different projects. For The Dell Lounge 3.0, we needed an extremely robust solution to support our traffic and a very specific feature set that could be extended to meet our future needs. We were also under a very tight deadline so it needed to be easily customized. After creating our feature matrix, seen below, we felt confident that Community Server was our answer. 

We were right. The build went smoothly and finished ahead of schedule. Creating templates with Community Server’s Chameleon theming engine was surprisingly easy to do.