Are you looking for a website solution to take your business to the next level but are unsure where to even start among all the different content management systems, frontends, and backends?
It’s important to find a solution that meets the needs of your business and provides the best return for your budget, but it can be overwhelming choosing between the myriad options available. There are many possible approaches, so let’s look at some of them.
We’ll break down some of the common solutions into 4 different categories:
Turnkey Solutions
Turnkey solutions are a popular choice for businesses that need a professional website quickly. These solutions allow you to choose a premade theme and make small modifications to match your brand’s style and feel. You can customize the color scheme, swap out images and logos, and customize all the written content to get a site live in no time. They usually include a limited number of page templates to deploy similar-looking pages with different content quickly.
Pros of turnkey solutions:
Cons of turnkey solutions:
Customized Themes
Customized themes offer a higher level of customization and flexibility over a turnkey solution. An extensible base theme is selected and then modified to match the goals and branding of the website. This makes them great for businesses that want a truly unique website to reflect their brand and values.
Pros of custom themes:
Cons of custom themes:
Enterprise Themes
An Enterprise theme is a theme built completely from a blank slate. It offers complete control of the layout and functionality of a website. The theme can be built to follow the design of your brand and meet all the marketing needs of the business. This is great for businesses that want a unique site with custom functionality and integrations with other third-party services. They can also provide greater speed optimizations and security since all the code is written specifically for that theme. They have no unnecessary code or unused features that could affect site performance.
Pros of enterprise themes:
Cons of enterprise themes:
Statically Generated Website
A statically generated site is a site that has pre-generated pages based on content from a headless CMS or other content repository. This comes with greater flexibility in customization and better load speed as the server hosting the site only needs to send along the static pages. A site running on a traditional CMS will often run many database queries, calls to external servers, and other backend logic to generate a page when a user visits the site. All this extra processing takes time and can affect the page load speed which in turn affects the overall user experience.
Don’t know what a headless CMS is yet? Read Headless CMS Explained to learn all about why you might want to use one!
Pros of statically generated websites:
Cons of statically generated websites:
Choosing the right solution
There are many factors to consider when choosing the right website solution. It can be overwhelming with the number of solutions and types. At MBB we like to do a full discovery process to determine the best solution to reach your goals. A few questions you might consider:
Choosing the right solution requires asking the right questions, and a thorough discovery process can help do that.
If you’re looking for a new website or need help with your existing site, drop us a line. We’d love to help.