Custom CMS: Key Features, Benefits, Development Aspects

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

Streamline creating content for your intranet, portal or website due to an intuitive content editor

Accelerate content creation due to customizable templates

Facilitate content search due to CMS search filtering capabilities

Get full visibility into content management in your company

Optimize your website using built-in SEO tools to drive more conversions

Accelerate content publishing due to automated approval workflows

Enable content personalization based on user roles, locations, and more

Easily track changes in content due to CMS versioning capabilities

Tired of Fragmented Content Management?

ScienceSoft’s consultants will help you build a robust CMS for simplified creation, sharing and publishing of diverse digital content as well as its structured and secure storage.

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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

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Benefits of Custom Content Management Systems

	Intuitive interface and smooth user experience.
	Effective SEO due to high website speed.
	Unlimited customization capabilities (in case you have unique content creation and delivery needs).
	Advanced data security and minimal risks of hacker attacks.
	Professional CMS support.

Custom CMS vs. WordPress vs. Open-Source CMS

	Custom CMS	WordPress	Open-source CMS
Flexibility	Functionality is tailored to specific content management needs Ability to implement custom plugins and tools	Functionality can be extended due to using third-party plugins Wide choice of third-party plugins and themes that are easy to integrate Limited options for customization	Functionality can be extended with third-party plugins and extensions
Ease of use	Intuitive UI No excessive features or tools	A little training is needed Large community of developers and users with many resources and tutorials	Steep learning curve
Security	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
Support	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
Costs	$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.

Custom CMS integrations - ScienceSoft

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.

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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.

Should You Invest in a Custom CMS?

Answer six questions to learn if out-of-the-box software is enough for your needs.

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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?

Yes

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 customers. 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.

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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.

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About ScienceSoft

ScienceSoft is a global IT consulting and IT service company headquartered in McKinney, TX, US. We advise our customers 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.