I’m pretty confident I’ve tested most of the major content platforms over the years - Joomla, Drupal, MoveableType, Blogger etc. etc. The list goes on.

One of the more annoyings things I’ve heard is people claiming that just by using one particular CMS your SEO and traffic needs will be sorted, this is complete rubbish. It’s not the CMS itself that makes or breaks your site building campaign it’s how you leverage that CMS features that really counts. At the end of the day 99% of any CMS is all back-end anyway. It’s totally invisible to the end-user and search spiders, and of course that’s the way it should be. Here are my criteria for choosing the perfect backend for my sites:

• Thousands of other users
• Unrivalled expandability
• Fast customisation of front-end (appearance and layouts)
• Good support
• Cutting edge web 2.0 technology

Maybe you shouldn’t use any off-the-shelf system? Perhaps the best path would be to develop your own back-end DON’T DO THIS! At least not until you’ve proven that there is absolutely no third-party solution that can meet all your needs, and I seriously doubt that’ll be the case.

Trust me on this, I learned this the hard way, right at the start of my site building career I convinced myself that there was nothing on the market that would be good enough for my site building exploits so I hired a coder to build me the ultimate back-end from the ground-up. It took over 9 months and thousands of dollars in development to get anywhere, not to mention hundreds of hours of testing and fixing and testing again. The product’s potential was amazing and it had some really awesome features but tying them all together and getting everything integrated was a total nightmare.

Fortunately whilst the development was underway I was running a lot of parallel tests on off-the-shelf-systems and one in particular stood head-and-shoulders above the rest. It met all my criteria and best of all it provided the perfect framework for tying together all of the functions and features I’d been trying to have developed. What was it? WordPress of course! It was a simple, easy to use platform with infinite customsation options available through the addition of plugins. Most importantly it was in use by millions of websites already. I immediately shelved the custom development project and had the all key features re-coded as WordPress plugins.

This was the birth of BlogPiG…