If you aren’t familiar with the differences between WordPress and Joomla, just know that choosing the CMS to run your website is one of the most important decisions you or your technical advisers will make in planning the development of your site. The CMS you choose can impact the scalability, usability, cost of development, and a number of other aspects of website ownership, including its “search engine friendliness.” WordPress is best known as blogging software, but can serve very well as a CMS.

The charts below illustrate what a difference I saw after we recently migrated one site from Joomla to WordPress.

Here you can see that Google has had to download fewer kilobytes, and has spent less time downloading content from this particular website each day, since we moved it from Joomla to WordPress.

One chart (not pictured) showed that Google has been crawling this site pretty consistently – before the migration, compared to after the migration. Google is crawling the site just as frequently now as it was before the migration. So we can rule that out as a major factor in kilobytes downloaded per day.

The reduced time spent downloading could be partly credited to the new host, which is a faster server than the old host. But it’s likely that the reduction in kilobytes downloaded also had a big impact on time spent downloading.

Ok, enough metrics. The bottom line is that Google has been able to crawl the site more easily and more quickly since we moved the site from Joomla to WordPress. [Update: This could be a good thing for our search engine rankings.] How much of this improvement is due to the out-of-the-box WordPress software, versus the custom theme we used on the site isn’t known. But it’s pretty clear that the Google spider is doing its crawling faster since we did away with Joomla.

I’m not going to pretend I have any better insight into the secret Google search engine ranking algorithm than any other SEO professional. I mean aside from a recent visit to the Google campus in Mountain View and a run-in earlier this year with Google’s SEO guru Matt Cutts at a conference, I’m in the same position as anyone else, limited to these basic sources of information:

• measuring and learning from the results of my own search engine optimization (SEO) experience
• interpreting the information Google publishes publicly
• inferring SEO best practices from the experience of others

But did I mention that the conference where I met Mr. Cutts was “WordCamp” (WordPress’ user conference) in San Francisco (pic)? He’s apparently a fan of WordPress. Wonder if he’s attending Joomla conferences? I highly doubt it.

Another major factor affecting the cost of any website project is the list of requirements. It pays to identify these requirements up front (one of the best ways to end up with an unattractive or otherwise useless website is to let your web designer define the project for you). Generally buyers have only a vague idea of what they want, and service providers fail to understand the idea fully, which can result in technical service providers making business recommendations, or even building a website which doesn’t fit the customer’s need. For sizable projects, an experienced project manager should help you identify your business needs. But educating yourself about the available options can allow you to better explain requirements yourself, keep cost in line, and ensure that the end product is what was needed in the first place.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your perspective) there are infinite options for your business website. Below are a few of the most popular options available to small businesses on a budget – along with some pro’s and con’s of each.

Canned site and One-Click CMS Installation: Many hosting accounts now come with a feature that makes it fairly easy to create a website very little technical knowledge. Canned sites (i.e.: GoDaddy’s Website Tonight, $6 – $10/month) are inexpensive, but very limited in terms of functionality – normally only used to create the most basic of brochure sites. Now, in all honesty, just because “website in a can” is an option does not mean it is a realistic business website solution. The only reason I’m including it here is because due to the attractive price tag many (very) small businesses are tempted to give it a shot for their first venture online. However, in terms of building your brand on the internet, these sites are extremely limited out of the box (or can, if you will), and not at all recommended. GoDaddy’s example Website Tonight website is: OnlineExample.com

Yahoo’s Small Business E-commerce solution promises to be a bit more comprehensive for e-commerce (shopping) sites. They charge $50 to get set up, then $40/month, plus a 1.5% transaction fee. It’s about the easiest shopping cart solution I know of, although for a truly custom look you will need to involve a designer. An example of a Yahoo Small Business e-commerce installation is SoftTurtle.com

But other options are becoming more commonly available – including one-click-install (using offerings like Fantastico) of open source (w) Content Management Systems (CMS) (w), such as Joomla and Drupal, and blogs, such as WordPress – all for free. All you have to do is log in as an administrator to your hosting account, sign up or install your service of choice, add pictures, text, pages, and change the visual themes, and with a weekend of plugging away you’ll have a website. For any of these options, of course you’ll still need to purchase a domain ($7 – $10/year) and a hosting account ($7 – $20/month) for at least 12 months to start. One very rough example of a one-click Joomla website that was launched in about 45 minutes, just for reference for this article, is AdultOnlyChild.com.

Customize Solutions Based on Packaged Software: CMS and blog platforms offer much more flexibility and feature options, such as organized content, news feeds, polls, and basic banner (advertisement) management. The CMS and blog solutions named above have enormous user groups that provide all kinds of “plug-ins” to help make your open source website extremely flexible and customizable. The ReitherCo Blog and the MyFamilyLaw Celebrity Divorce Blog are examples WordPress sites that can be launched for a couple thousand dollars, but don’t forget, you still need to write the content.

You can also use one system for your text content, and another for your products. For example, one of the better shopping cart systems available for the money, X-Cart, can now be integrated with Joomla, using a recently developed plug-in. To incorporate these plug-ins, or a visual theme to represent your logo and company brand, expect to need a web designer. You should be able to have a nice looking, functional brochure or portal site for $1,000 to $3,000 – maybe $7,000 to $10,000 with the shopping cart integration (this combination would yield a very capable e-commerce site). With the right team to execute the project, these solutions will cover the needs of the vast majority of small e-commerce businesses.

Highly Customized vs. Proprietary from the Ground Up: If standard functionality and basic design modifications (the solutions above) don’t quite cut it for you, that doesn’t mean it’s time for a from-scratch development project. Because ground-up solutions are costly and frequently unnecessary, it’s worth double checking your assumptions about whether the right system is not already available for you. Do you have ideas for your website’s functionality that aren’t covered or easily customized in the packaged blog or CMS systems? Before you jump to this conclusion, do yourself a favor and get familiar with the standard system setup of some of the available CMS’s. Have someone on your team do a one-click install of Joomla or Drupal (using Fantastico), and get familiar with the administrative back-end of the system. Take a demo on either of the CMS’s main websites. Because it’s almost always less expensive to buy than it is to build a new system, it’s worth seeing what’s out there that will work for you. If open source doesn’t provide the kind of support or guarantee you’re looking for, consider one of the other major CMS vendors. An example of a highly customized Joomla driven website, with a WordPress blog: MyFamilyLaw.com

Next: Business Website Cost (Part 6): Other Cost Variables

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