Content Management System (CMS) Travel Agency Websites
CMS, or Content Management System, is software that is used to create websites and to manage the content within the website. For the most part, CMS is free to use. To give an idea of how popular using a CMS is, WordPress is said to be the engine for over 35% of all websites in the world. For the sake of this article we will look closely at WordPress and then the other CMS out there.
WordPress is public domain software that is free to use for anyone that wants to. In addition to using WordPress you will need server space to host the website on, a domain name and possibly a WordPress theme (or prepackaged design). There are actually two different WordPress sites. wordpress.org is the site where you can download the current WordPress release while wordpress.com is a site that hosts WordPress both for free and also for a fee. If you want to operate your own website on your own server then wordpress.org is the place to go. If you want to access a hosted WordPress website then wordpress.com is where you would go.
While the wordpress code is free to use, there are hundreds of thousands of website themes to choose from and even more plugins that will add tens of thousands of special functions to your website. It is quite likely that if you are looking at establishing a sophisticated travel agency website that it will most likely be built on WordPress.
If you intend to build your site for organic traffic, then the combination of WordPress and Yoast are the winning team. Yoast is an application that evaluates on-page SEO on the fly and suggests better ways to build your page for SEO. For a non-techy user, this is the winning combination and one you should investigate. If you do not feel comfortable installing the WordPress code onto your server, there are thousands of techys who will install the WordPress code and a theme if you are using one. To start your research on finding the right one visit fiverr.com.
Here are some of the more popular CMS. All of these are well established and have many themes and plugins available. Many people believe that because WordPress is so popular that it is an easy and frequent target for hackers to attack.
Joomla
This is a great alternative to WordPress and has thousands of free plugins on their website. Joomla enjoys millions of users and there are numerous themes and templates that one can use for design. Visit Joomla.com.
Drupal
This free CMS is a bit more sophisticated than most of them. And, as such, is a great choice for more complex websites. Lots of themes and templates to work with. Examples of sites built with Drupal take a look at Twitter, Pinterest, Verizon and NASA. Visit drupal.org.
While there are numerous other CMS out there, these three make up the vast majority of websites using CMS as a platform and there is really no reason to look any further unless you have a specific application that requires special coding.
