Brands are extensively using Content Management Systems to create and manage their digital content effectively. Over the years, Content Management Systems have taken the place of the old static websites. Currently, the dynamic status of information raises the need for a quick and accurate adaptation. Which makes Content Management Systems the best approach to a better collaborative way for authoring, editing, and publishing content. How should you choose the right Content Management System for your multilingual Digital Content?
Here are the General Factors
- Depending on your Brand size, budget, type, the volume of business and expected growth, you have the following choices: free license CMSs among them WordPress which is perfect for small to mid business. Other free licensed CMSs are Umbraco, Alfresco and many others. For Larger Brands, there are several choices like Episerver, Sitecore, Sitefinity, AEM.
- Also, it depends on how the Brand decides to manage its CMS, internally or outsourcing. The CMS technology should be determined based on the employees’ technical experience whether it is Java, PHP, .NET, PERL, Python.
- Hosting is an important factor too. Each CMS has its own deployment and scaling approaches, therefore, the hosting price varies from one CMS to another (usually PHP CMSs hosting are cheaper than .Net or Java).
- It is also important that the CMS has a strong Market place for Add-ons. For example, Episerver and WordPress provide a large online library for third-party tools free or paid.
- Technical Support is crucial as well, some CMSs are free but they charge fees for additional technical support.
- In addition, the type of the Brand Industry matters: as some CMSs are better for displaying offers with images and visual information like for Hotels and resorts. Some other CMSs are more suitable for companies’ websites and blogging like WordPress. Other ones are more suitable for e-Commerce like Magento.
How can a CMS enhance Customer Experience?
The Content Management System should have the capability to be localized which is very important. Almost all CMSs pretend that they are localizable, but practically there is a big difference between them regarding there capabilities to be easily adapted efficiently for a local customer. A good CMS can positively help you share your Brands’ Message in the US as well as in China or the MENA region. What are the characteristics and functionalities you need to check first before choosing a CMS?
Localization Factors
- How easy can you set up a CMS for multilingual websites? For some Content Management Systems, like Episerver and Sitecore, you need to add the new languages to the system and, with one click, you can assign them to the selected page/block (Episerver) or Item (Sitecore). Other CMSs, require to clone the page or the whole website in order to have the same website in another language.
- How does CMS manage local SEO?
- What are the built-in workflows and the capability of the CMS to create new ones?
- In order to localize your CMS, you need to translate the content. The inline manual approach to translate the content manually is a bad practice. CMS content needs to be exported for translation and imported back. Episerver has a built-in free tool to do that, while others need a third-party component integrated in order to export and import translations. Other CMS may provide this feature but with extra fees or for certain versions only (i.e. Enterprise version)
- How much does the CMS help track changes between source and target languages?
- Does the CMS have a strong Fallback approach to maintain user experience for certain non-translated pieces of content?
- And, does the CMS have a versioning system to store different versions of the same content per language? Is it possible to rollback from one version to another one?
- From a technical perspective, is it easy to customize or create new templates especially when a Brand is targeting the Middle East and North Africa Countries where the first language there is the Arabic (Right to Left direction)?
Now you have selected your best CMS. The next article will be about how to prepare the CMS for multilingual and Content Management Systems localization best practices.
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