Custom Content Management System
Key Features, Benefits, Development Aspects
With 13-year experience in delivering content management systems (CMS), ScienceSoft provides consultancy on custom and platform-based CMS.
What Is a Custom CMS?
A custom CMS is a tailored solution for creating, storing, and publishing digital content. Having done a number of CMS development projects, we can confidently say that a custom CMS helps companies establish faster content-related processes and drive significant improvements in the productivity of employees involved in content generation, distribution, and use.
Custom content management system may include:
- Document management.
- Records management (documents for legal purposes).
- Digital asset management (audio, video, graphic content).
- Web content management.
Custom CMS: Key Features
With 13-year experience in CMS development, ScienceSoft can shortlist the core functionality of custom CMS.
Creation and storage
- Content authoring tools (e.g., WYSIWYG editor).
- Built-in customizable templates.
- Content hierarchy taxonomy.
- Indexing and search.
- Integrated file managers.
Administration
- Content governance.
- Reporting and analytics.
- Integrated help desk.
Distribution and publishing
- Built-in SEO tools.
- SEO-friendly URLs.
- Content review and approval workflows, including complex workflows (e.g., non-linear, multistep).
- Content personalization.
- Multisite and multilanguage support.
- Accessibility on mobile devices.
Security and compliance
- Access control.
- Role-based permissions.
- Versioning.
- Audit trail.
- Content retention and deletion policies.
- Regulatory compliance (e.g., GLBA, SOX, HIPAA).
Showcasing Key Custom CMS Functionality
Our Experience of Working with CMS Solutions
What ScienceSoft's Customers Say
ScienceSoft's team of five Java developers and one test engineer have been working hard to ensure our <CMS> product – Enonic XP – exceeds our customer's expectations.
ScienceSoft's experience in agile development ensured smooth project implementation and iterative development of Enonic XP. As a result, Enonic XP has evolved into an easy-to-use and scalable platform, which is crucial for our success.
Morten Øien Eriksen, CEO at Enonic, a provider of an innovative CMS platform
Benefits of Custom Content Management Systems
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Intuitive interface and smooth user experience. |
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Effective SEO due to high website speed. |
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Unlimited customization capabilities (in case you have unique content creation and delivery needs). |
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Advanced data security and minimal risks of hacker attacks. |
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Professional CMS support. |
Custom CMS vs. WordPress vs. Open-Source CMS
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Custom CMS |
WordPress |
Open-source CMS |
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Flexibility
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Functionality can be extended with third-party plugins and extensions |
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Ease of use
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Steep learning curve |
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Security
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High-level data security due to development from scratch and the ability to implement custom security features |
Many WordPress plugins and third-party services have security loopholes and bugs |
High security risks due to public availability of code and frequent hacker attacks on popular open-source CMSs |
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Support
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Handling CMS issues by a dedicated support team within hours |
There can be delays in support provided by WordPress |
A CMS product vendor is responsible for CMS maintenance and support |
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Costs
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$150,000 – 400,000 depending on functionality |
Free (except for hosting, domain registration, plugins, and themes) |
Free (except for third-party plugins and extensions and other costs like hosting) |
Valuable Integrations for Custom CMS
ScienceSoft recommends integrating custom CMS with other systems to ensure content consistency across your organization, facilitate customer onboarding and marketing campaigns, streamline publishing and updating information about your products, and more.
- CRM - to facilitate converting prospects into customers by the regular distribution of personalized content.
- ERP - to ensure secure storage and consistency of your company’s digital content involved in financial, sales, supply chain management, HR, and other business processes.
- Ecommerce solution - to easily create and publish content about your products, structurally organize and make it easily searchable on your site. For example, for one of ScienceSoft’s customers, our team integrated CMS with the ecommerce application to facilitate website page creation and editing for non-technical users. As a result, the customer’s marketing team just needed to fill CMS widgets with relevant text, images and links.
- Marketing automation software - to simplify creating various types of marketing content to streamline marketing campaigns across email, website, social channels, and more.
- Social networks - to promote corporate content like news, events, publications, and more by direct publishing on social media.
Custom CMS Costs and ROI
The average cost of custom CMS solutions ranges from $150,000 to $400,000 for the overall services package, including custom CMS design, development of custom features, configuration, and other related services.
Need a CMS Project Estimation?
For midsize businesses and enterprises, custom CMS implementation shows the following economic impact:
- 3 – 14 months payback period
- 230 – 400% average annual ROI
Depending on the functionality, custom CMS development can take from 2-3 months (core functionality) to 4-6 months (a CMS with an innovative component).
Key financial outcomes of custom content management system:
- Accelerated content-related business processes.
- Higher business productivity of employees using content extensively (e.g., lawyers).
- Reduced costs for:
- Content development and publishing.
- Translation.
- Website maintenance.
- Compliance.
Is Custom CMS Your Best Choice?
Answer six questions to learn if out-of-the-box software is enough for your needs.
Do you need your CMS to be in line with your lead generation campaigns and content goals and easily adapt to changes?
Do you have or expect high website traffic (at least 5,000 simultaneous visitors at peak times)?
Do you have content distribution channels other than a website (e.g., a mobile app, social media)?
Do you have unique content creation and delivery needs (e.g., a complex non-linear publishing workflow)?
Are you planning to have dynamic content (personalized for each user)?
Do you need integrations with custom or legacy marketing platform, CRM or other systems?
Tell us more about your needs
Please answer at least three questions to get results.
Market-available CMS will work fine for you
ScienceSoft can help you select the most fitting platform and tune it to your requirements and processes.
Either option is potentially viable
In your case, it’s not obvious if the benefits of custom software outweigh its development challenges. We offer to do a thorough analysis of your requirements and conduct a feasibility study to give you an informed conclusion.
Custom CMS is the winning option for you
As the next step, ScienceSoft can help you plan your custom CMS and estimate its cost and development timeframe.
Custom CMS is the winning option for you
As the next step, ScienceSoft can help you plan your custom CMS and estimate its cost and development timeframe.
Success Factors of Custom CMS
Among key factors determining the efficiency of custom content management system are:
Well-structured and intuitive content organization
that helps reduce time for content search and accelerate content-related business processes.
Diverse built-in and customizable content templates
that ensure high content reuse, which helps reduce writing time and translation costs and provides content consistency across your organization.
A high level of automation
enables creating, editing, approving and publishing content faster and with less effort.
Custom CMS Development with ScienceSoft
ScienceSoft’s experience in CMS consulting and development as well as custom software development allows us to bring full-fledged content management system to our clients. Our CMS services offering includes:
Custom CMS consulting
- Analyzing content management needs.
- Eliciting technical requirements based on the needs.
- Conducting a feasibility study and CMS ROI assessment.
- Selecting relevant technologies and tools.
- Advising on useful integrations.
- Drawing a project plan.
- Designing user-friendly and intuitive UX/UI.
Custom CMS development
- Analysis of content management needs.
- Custom CMS design.
- End-to-end CMS development and deployment.
- Data migration.
- Integration with required systems (CRM, ERP, etc.).
- Quality assurance.
- User adoption and training.
- Post-implementation support.
What makes ScienceSoft different
We achieve project success no matter what
ScienceSoft does not pass mere project administration off as project management, which, unfortunately, often happens on the market. We practice real project management, achieving project success for our clients no matter what.
About ScienceSoft
ScienceSoft is a global IT consulting and IT service company headquartered in McKinney, TX, US. We advise our clients on custom and platform-based CMS implementation and offer all-round related services from business analysis to post-implementation support. Achieving project goals in spite of time and budget constraints, as well as changing requirements, is ScienceSoft's top priority. You set goals, we drive the project to fulfill them.