August 20, 2010

Even in 2010, managing and maintaining a website can be a daunting and complicated process. Blogging platforms like Tumblr and Posterous are great, but they aren't always the right solutions for small businesses that might need a product page, contact forms and other landing pages associated with a business.

Similarly, popular content management system (CMS) solutions like WordPress, Drupal and ExpressionEngine can sometimes be overkill for businesses that just want the ability to build out a few pages and have an easy way to modify and update those pages.

Fortunately, there is a solution. More and more developers are catering to the "lightweight CMS" market. These alternatives might not have as many options and features as a traditional CMS, but they are built with an emphasis on making webpages easy to create and update. Here are five of our favorite lightweight CMS alternatives for small business users.

1. MojoMotor - $49.95 per site, self-hosted

MojoMotor is the latest product from Ellis Labs, the company behind CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine. MojoMotor bills itself as "the publishing engine that does less," which makes it perfect for smaller projects. Featuring options like drag-n-drop pages and friendly front-end editing via a WYSIWYG HTML interface, MojoMotor is designed to be easy and fast. WYSIWYG stands for "what you see is what you get," and implies a user interface that allows the user to edit a webpage in a view that is very close to its final form when published. This eliminates the need for users to memorize coding commands.

We really like the front-end friendly design that is accessible for end users (who will be inputting most of the content), but also flexible enough to support rapid customization via HTML and CSS. If your needs outgrow MojoMotor, you can easily import your content into ExpressionEngine, a much heftier publishing platform.

2. CushyCMS - Free, Pro plan is $28 per month, hosted

CushyCMS is a hosted CMS, meaning that the content and settings are stored on the CushyCMS servers. Users just tell Cushy CMS their site URL and FTP information, and all the editing and customization takes place on the Cushy servers.

The free account is good for unlimited sites and pages, but the Pro account includes WYSIWYG editing and the ability to brand the CMS any way you want.

3. GetSimple CMS - Free, self-hosted

GetSimple CMS is a PHP-based CMS that doesn't need a MySQL database to function. It was designed with the small site market in mind and has an intuitive user interface that makes editing content blocks and adding pages very simple.

GetSimple also supports features like sitemap generation and keyword and tagging suggestions.

4. Simple CMS - Free for one site, $15 per month for each additional site, hosted

Simple CMS is a really great option for web designers who want to create a site that is easy for their small business clients to update and edit. The designer can designate what portions of the site are editable, making it easy for the owner to make changes or additions.

Like CushyCMS, the backend is hosted on the Simple CMS servers and no downloading or web installation is necessary.

5. Perch - £35 (~$55 USD) per site, self-hosted

Perch almost feels like a full CMS but it has a much more streamlined user interface, especially for content editors. It's a great choice for designers who want a site that is easy for end users to modify but that doesn't overwhelm users with options.

Perch includes some really great features like image resizing and microformats.

These are five of our favorite lightweight CMS alternatives for small business users. Do you have a favorite that we didn't mention? What do you use to power your small business website? Let us know in the comments below.

Related Topics

• Technology

Related keywords

Christina Warren, Article, content management systems, Mashable

Join the conversation ( 7 )

• Elliot Lenn 1 year 8 months and 29 days ago

  

  Christina, congratulations, good story.I would add SiteKreator to this list.With a business-focussed feature set, a global Content Delivery Network for improved speed and availability, over 100.000 SMBs have created their sites with us.SiteKreator is also available in a private label version from over 200 resellers worldwide.You can sign up for a free, 14-day trial at http://sitekreator.com/sitekreator/sign_up.html

• Jennifer Nagel 1 year 8 months and 30 days ago

  

  I use SnapPages.com for my web hosting and development (www.dandelionvideo.com). Their motto used to be "So easy your grandma can do it," and I believe that entirely. It's 8 bucks a month for the Pro version, and they have a Free version that has nearly as many features.

• Ralph Matlack 1 year 9 months and 1 days ago

  

  SaaS, hosting-included CMS solutions are hard to beat for smaller businesses who favor ease over power. Our research suggests that the net promoter score (which measures “would you recommend this to a friend or colleague?”) for these types of solutions can be much higher than for more traditional CMS or web authoring solutions. Here are my favorites:Intuit Websites* - Great balance of ease, features, and control, plus great phone support (http://www.intuit.com/website-building-software/)Snappages – Fantastic user interface, plus Developer Accounts for web designers (http://snappages.com/)Lifeyo – Very easy to get started, plus nice integration with Facebook (http://www.lifeyo.com/)All of the services above allow you to easily embed blog functionality right within your site. This eliminates the need to force a business website into a blog-centric tool or to maintain a site and a blog with two different tools.*Full Disclosure: I’m on the Intuit Websites product team.”

• Christina Warren 1 year 9 months and 2 days ago

  

  TJ,Great post! I agree that WordPress when combined with a theme like Thesis can be a great solution for lots of sites. It's not going to be as lightweight as some of the choices I mentioned but I think it's a good base for users with intermediate needs. Gjeragi,Thanks for linking Pagelime and Surreal. Both are great options. Vaishakhi,I wasn't familiar with Daisy. Thanks for the link!

• TJ McCue 1 year 9 months and 4 days ago

  

  Mine probably doesn't count as lightweight, but I use Wordpress with the Thesis theme. It is still pretty user-friendly, but perhaps not as user-friendly as what you share here, Christina. I've shared some thoughts of why I like it in this post: http://www.salesrescueteam.com/why-i-use-thesis/

• Gjergji Kokushta 1 year 9 months and 4 days ago

  

  Nice list :) I would like to mention here: http://pagelime.com/ and http://surrealcms.com/Pagelime offers add/remove repeatable items, like in list of products - you can manage a simple one page catalog.SurrealCMS is very similar to CushyCMS but has some more features. Also support CushyCMS editing.Both Pagelime and SurrealCMS are SaaS (Software as a Service) options.

• Vaishakhi Lahoti 1 year 9 months and 4 days ago

  

  How about Daisy CMS, I was able to set it up with relative ease in my previous organisation and its also open source. http://www.daisycms.org/daisy/index.html