Recently I have been trialling some content management systems for some very small websites that do not warrant custom development. I have looked at some of the big players like Expression Engine, Joomla, etc as well a lot of others.

In the end I found one that I really liked the look of, it seemed perfect for my needs so I tried to install it. I went to the set up screen and it was totally blank, so I followed all the advice on the forums, read the docs and still had no luck.

Here is where things went wrong, I immediately went to the site to look for support and there wasn’t any support only a support forum. So I posted a message and waited, and waited. In the end I got three replies pretty much all saying the same thing; read the docs and post your server config, both of which I had stated in my original post. After two days of waiting I gave up and chose another solution that had better support.

The lessons here are that if you cater for businesses you need to:

• Solve user issues quickly
• Provide support (even if you have to pay for it, I would have paid for support)
• Provide multiple channels for a user to reach you, having a forum is not enough
• Give people an idea of time scales, there is nothing worse than not knowing

Please do not get me wrong, communities and forums are superb, and I am grateful that someone took the time to reply to my forum post. But they are just not good enough if you have a business requirement that is time sensitive.

You need to know who your users are and what is important to them; price, time, operations, task completion etc and make sure you communicate how you solve issues if they arise.