There are several hosted CMS solutions for small to medium size companies, such as Clickability, Hot Banana SaaS, Crown Peak and elKontent. These hosted CMS solutions are targeted towards organizations who cannot or do not want to deal with the techie stuff when it comes to setting up, customizing and maintaining their CMS.
How do you determine which solution is right for you: open source or hosted?
As long as the company has available IT resources to set up and maintain their CMS, an open-source solution would be the most cost-effective way to go. Companies that lack such resources should keep it in mind that while an open source content management system can be packed with features, there is often a long way home from the day an off-the-shelf CMS is downloaded and the day it actually meets the needs of your business, from the branding, usability and functional stand points.
Installation:
Installing an open source CMS is not like installing ICQ on your computer, where you are guided through a set of steps and you are done in a few minutes. In fact, I have yet to see a CMS that could be installed without any technical expertise. In most cases, permissions need to be set, configurations files adjusted, commands typed into a command line, and a whole bunch of other stuff that a non-technical user would be scared to mess with.
Look and feel customization
Once a CMS is installed, its presentation layer needs to be customized to reflect your web design and your brand. While many open source CMS claim that their system is template-based and that logic is separated from the look and feel, in reality this is simply not true, not necessarily because of the bad internal design of the system, but simply because when it comes to a dynamic web application, the logic and presentation are not always possible to completely separate.
Severe featuritis
In order to acquire more customers, most off-the-shelf CMS vendors tend to pack their products with as many features as possible to satisfy just about any need out there. The goal is to be everything for everyone. While a feature-rich system may sound appealing to many organizations at first, that appeal quickly evaporates when it turns out that Bob in marketing quietly avoids updating news on the home page because figuring out how to get to that particular "snippet" or "xzamboltet" causes a huge migraine.
There is no doubt that complex and feature-rich systems are necessary in certain situations, most of us would rather see simplicity. The less time it takes to learn something (a web application or a gadget) the higher are the odds that we'll actually use it.
Content management needs of most small and medium businesses are very straightforward: update the content of the site. 90% of the time a typical CMS content writer (i.e. Bob from marketing) needs to update the text on an existing page. If archival, version control, approval, work flows, template updates, e-commerce, trackbacks, wikis, subscriptions and member communication are not a part of content management requirements for your business, they simply should not be a part of your CMS. Not only will your typical user mess them up, but also when faced with a bunch of buttons to useless features that cover up the path to accomplish one simple task, your typical user will not use the system (or won't use it productively enough to justify installing a CMS in the first place).
The cure to featuritis is to either start with a very simple CMS and add the features you need. Or customize the back-end interface of a feature-rich CMS to only include the needed items.
From developers to developers
Open source software in general is written by developers for developers. While open source software can produce great frameworks, applications and toys for other geeks to play with, the user aspect of the open source software in general still leaves much to be desired. Open source is based on grassroots and enthusiasm of programmers to make software better - in whatever way a geek thinks "better" is. As a result, by nature open source software is seldom polished from a usability standpoint (there are exceptions to the rule, of course).
Same goes with commitment. Even with a large open source CMS development team, the commitment is there as long as the interest is there. This is just the nature of open source development.
The point is - you just can't launch an open-source CMS with a click of a button. The to-do list that needs to be completed after the button has been clicked depends on the solution and the needs of your organization. But this to-do list is often severely underestimated or completely ignored, resulting in not-so-usable CMS implementations, higher implementation costs and lesser overall value.
Hence, many SMBs with limited technical staff are opting to outsource the hassle to a hosted CMS vendor, and gain a few extra points by doing so:
Save on upfront costs - since many on-demand CMS solutions charge a monthly fee, the costs of setup and customization are spread over a longer period of time
One stop vendor - with a hosted CMS you have one vendor who is hosting and maintaining the site, so there is one number to call in case of any issue, and one company to blame. (While with a traditional open source CMS installation the hosting company may blame the IT consulting company who installed the CMS, and the IT consulting company in turn could blame the open source vendor or the hosting company).
There are exceptions to every rule of course. And just like with any product or solution, what really matters is who is behind it.
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