In my last post I introduced the idea of the four skills needed in an online publishing business:

• Technical
• Editorial
• Marketing
• Sales

The scariest of these is often the first hurdle to overcome once the idea for a new site pops into your head, and the burning desire to become the next Rupert Murdoch overcomes you.

This post delves a little into the tools available to help get your site up and running. I’m assuming you don’t have the development skills to tackle this from scratch, or abudgetto hire those skills, so we’re goingt to look at various Content Management Systems (CMS) to help you get started, beginning with the simple & basic and a few pointers on where to go to find a top notch enterprise version capable of sustaining a multi-million pound content business.

I’m going to look at 3 levels:

• Blogging tools
• Entry Level CMS Systems
• Where to start looking for an enterprise level CMS

1) Blogging tools

Blogging is the simplest way to get a site up and running, just log in, type some useful stuff about your favourite subject, and away you go.

By far the simplest of the tools available is the Google-owned Blogger. No technical skill whatsoever is needed to get started with this, and as it’s owned by blogger, SEO comes, to an extent, as standard.

I’d largely forgotten this tool, but constant jibes from Lee McCoy persuaded me to look at it again and I now have a dozen niche sites on anything from competitions to hay fever remedies running on it, all doing quite nicely with a minimum of link building.

The other big player in this area is Wordpress. Again, you can set up an account at Wordpress.com with no technical expertise, but most Wordpress users prefer to host their own so they can take advantage of the many free wordpress themes and useful wordpress plugins that extend the tool into something more resembling an online magazine site than the stereotype of a stream of geeky thoughts that characterised early blogs.

2) Entry Level CMS Systems

Blogging tools, and Wordpress in particular can take your site a long long way, but they are rather one-dimensional. Each post has a title and a blockof content which you need to format yourself. You can add in extra fields, but these are the same across every section of your site and things can get complicated as you grow.

That’s when you need what I’d call a ‘proper’ CMS. A real grown up CMS will help organise the information relevant to each each site section and make it easier for someone with no HTML skills to add content to your site.

For example, take this SEO Training site I built as a training session a while back, and click across the main headings.

The books have the following information:

• Title
• Description
• Image
• Link to the seller

The courses have different information,and their own layout:

• Date
• Organiser
• Price
• Link

The forms used to enter this information contain nothing but the information required so I can train someone in data entry in seconds. For anyone who has ever built a totally bespoke site it’s very similar, but the admin tools will give you a huge head start and be much easier for an untrained user than mucking about with phpMyAdmin

The particular CMS this is built on is Expression Engine which I’m loving more every day I use it. It’s Shine Marketing’s CMS of choice for non-eCommerce projects and we’ve just finished this Luxury Car Review site using it. I’ve also used it on at least one new affiliate project every month since I discovered it last year, and have had some nice little custom developments done on a membership site which are being fed back into the product this year.

A few others I’ve dabbled with include the very popular Joomla which I used to build a site for an online PR agency for a couple of years ago and Drupal, a great site for community-driven projects.

At this level some really great sites start to emerge, and their authors have often put a fair bit of effort in to tailoring the CMS to do just what they want. Expect to find some strong opinions and fierce loyalty amongst users!

3) Enterprise Level CMS

With the systems above costing little or nothing for the software, what do you get when you start paying big bucks for an enterprise level CMS? I dived into these last year for a client in Dubai providing real estate information in emerging markets who eventually chose Webdeck for the Cityscape MIS site.

At this level you should expect serious levels of customisation, integration with many different other systms (e.g. subscription management, datafeeds from all over the world) and content managemnt that goes beyond text and images. Video an dother document formats can easily beconverted without monkeying about with HTML to get them on the site. Ever tried cut+pasting Word documents into Joomla? You’ll know what I mean.

Also at this level the sites are designed to be managed big teams, so permissions to add, edit and publish content can all lie with different people.

If you’re in the market for this level of system, or planning on speccing your own you might find the buyers guides at e-consultancy a good place to start.

One word of advice is that the team is at least as important as the technology at this level so meet face to face, and get references before you buy.

There’s a CMS for you, and your wallet.

So there you have it, whether you are looking for somewhere to tell the world about your love of knitting yarns, or building a multinational financial information site there’s a CMS system out there, and a ton of people who can help you set it up if needs be, and allow you to concentrate on the bits of your business that make - rather than cost - money.