Of all issues, your first and foremost issue you need to decide upon is the CMS (content management system) to run your online business on and the right web hosting provider that is compatible with the CMS of your choice.
Whether you are a Do-It-Yourself or outsourcer type of webpreneur, you need to understand that not all CMS are created equal and well-suited to any kind of websites.
A CMS can be better for a type of business websites, but fails to deliver in other types of business websites.
WordPress, for example, is great for blogging and easy to use even if you have limited or no programming knowledge. However, to run an eCommerce site, WordPress lags behind Joomla, that is a powerhouse for eCommece type of business websites. In other case, if your online business is, for example, a user-generated how-to websites with 20,000 pages online (e.g. eHow.com,) Drupal is your best CMS.
Drupal is the best CMS for your information online business startup
If you are going to startup informational websites, such as eHow.com, eZineArticles.com, Wikipedia.com, and Google Knol, Drupal CMS is the best choice for you. Here is why:
1. Drupal can handle any website sizes
Drupal can handle tens of thousands page (a number you should expect when you are going to run an informational website.)
2. Drupal is very secure
Hacking is a major issue of popular websites. To avoid future headaches, you should start your online business by building it on a strong foundation; Drupal can provide you with such demanding need.
3. Drupal is very stable
With an informational online business, you need to expect high incoming traffic. When your web server can’t handle the request, Drupal shuts down – it doesn’t crash.
I’ve been working with WordPress long enough to understand that when the web server goes out or something else goes wrong, WordPress gives me the “white screen of death.” Drupal, on the other hand, shuts down when the server goes wrong, and goes on again when the server can handle requests like it should be.
Of course, hosting your Drupal-powered website with Drupal Hosting can make things better; you can avoid server incompatibility issues, thus increasing the stability of your business website.
Some Drupal caveats
Of course, there is no CMS with no weakness. Drupal has its own downsides, and you need to heed these issues before you decide anything:
1. Drupal is not user friendly
Drupal is a web developer’s toy box. A good web developer can build virtually anything based on Drupal. It is an open source, has a strong community and plenty of functions to handling any kind of functions you can think of.
That being said, Drupal is not user friendly. “User” here refers to your business website administrator; your business website visitors won’t see any difference. This means that, unless you are a web programmer yourself, you need to employ a Drupal-savvy webmaster to manage your site.
2. Visual design on Drupal is challenging
Building an informational online business with a pretty front-end design is not easy; related to no. 1 above, creating a design template for Drupal is challenging if you don’t have a knowledge on Drupal.
Should I or my Web Developer build my online business with Drupal?
You obviously want your informational online business to grow well. That means you need to prepare everything for high traffic, huge number of pages – especially if your content is user generated (eHow, eZineArticles.com, and Wikipedia are all user-generated.) For such need, you should highly consider using Drupal as your choice of CMS.
Of course, due to the challenges in developing your informational website, you need a Drupal-savvy web developer, Drupal-savvy web designer, and a Drupal Hosting.
You should expect some hiccups to happen along the way; you should invest well on all of the above to avoid technological gap issues in the future when your online business grows well.
Just like what Henry Ford said – Before everything else, getting ready is the secret to success.
Ivan Widjaya
Informational online business
Image: Idea go