For years it’s been widely accepted that a content management system is a must-have when you’re looking for a new website, but CMS’s aren’t all created equal. We think ours is a bit special…
What are the alternatives like?
The most popular CMS systems – names you might know like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla – have evolved from different roots, but they all have the same main aim: to enable people with little or no programming skills to create and update websites. They are open-source systems so anyone can download and install them without paying.
WordPress, Drupal and Joomla have a lot to do, controlling layouts and menus as well as text and images, so they have pretty serious user interfaces that can be quite intimidating at first and have lots of functions that will rarely or never be used by the website owner. On the content management front, they come with a basic set of features that can be added to using third-party plug-ins.
So Noisegate CMS is…
…ideologically different: it can’t build websites on its own but it is really good at content management. It’s a database-driven CMS, built from the ground up with our clients in mind so includes features as standard that would require the installation of add-ons with open source systems, including:
- a blog / news module that automatically creates an index and updates news feeds around the website
- a user-friendly slideshow module
- Testimonials module – selecting testimonials at random from a database
- YouTube and Vimeo integration that makes sure that videos fit the panel they’re embedded in, and with the optimal set of preferences
- Twitter integration, automatically tweeting news / blog articles
The focus on content management rather than site building helps to make Noisegate CMS really intuitive. Using CMS requires only basic IT skills – we often say “if you can use Word you’ll be alright with CMS”.
So it’s easy to use, but it can do really clever stuff too: sophisticated content categorisation and tagging makes it easy to create relationships between different pieces of content, so a website can easily display related articles, downloads, products, videos, etc. A key aim there is to make websites more useful and interesting so people stay on the site for longer and visit more pages.
Integrations
Although Noisegate CMS can only be implemented by a programmer, the fact that a programmer is extensively involved in all of our projects, combined with the accessible structure of CMS, means that we don’t have to rely on off-the-shelf third-party plug-ins when a client needs something special. Lots of our websites have integrations with other systems that could have been more costly with another CMS, for instance:
- The Letting People’s property database is integrated with Gemini, which in turn uploads content straight to Right Move
- A great form builder module, in use on BusinessCoaching.co.uk and Brilliant Minds amongst others, is integrated with MailChimp and Campaign Monitor email marketing, letting users map form fields to custom fields in their marketing database
- CWLEP’s event subscriptions are handled by Eventbrite
- Lots of our websites are integrated with e-commerce solutions
Because Noisegate CMS makes bespoke development easy, we don’t force our clients to build processes around systems, we build systems around their processes.
And where open source CMS systems require a unique installation for each website, Noisegate CMS is a single, central entity, so when we upgrade it we do so in one place and all website owners benefit.
In summary…
If you’re the kind of person who loves to get their hands dirty, tinkering with templates and browsing for new plug-ins, you might be better off looking at Joomla or WordPress.
On the other hand, if you want a website that looks great, is really easy to update and difficult to break, or you need a website that fits your processes and integrates with your systems, Noisegate CMS might be just what you need.