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Content Management Software (CMS) provides community building through blogging, personalization, forums and message boards. It helps build customer loyalty with subscriptions and RSS feeds. It allows you to easily manage lots of content from multiple authors.

How do you decide what CMS software to use for the management of your web site content?

What CMS authoring tools should you use?

Let's discuss a few different content management solutions:

Open Source

This is probably the most popular because it's free to acquire, has lots of flexibility plus there is a very active Open Source Community for support. You'll only need to purchase a domain name and a hosting service.

Hosted

You have less control with a hosted solution because the company selling the software hosts and maintains the CMS. This frees you from administrative responsibilities and reduces the initial cost but will cost you more in the long term.

Commercial

A commercial CMS designer builds the CMS application then sells it to you. You will be responsible for the maintenance. You have more control but your initial costs will be expensive because it is custom built.

Nonprofit

Many CMS sites are built for nonprofit companies sometimes. These types may be hosted or commercial. The features built into them are geared towards the organization.

My recommendation

I strongly recommend Open Source Content Management Software because, it's free, has hundreds of templates to choose from, contains good documentation and provides lots of support from open source forums.

If you're not a do-it-yourself type person or prefer a custom built solution hire a web designer. Ask him to show you sample sites where he's used a content management system to build them.