As with any technology investment, when it comes to planning your approach to a multi-site strategy, it’s important that you fully understand your needs before taking the plunge and buying a shiny new content management system (CMS).
Here’s our 5 steps to follow to avoid over-spend!
To begin with, make sure you conduct a thorough assessment of your business needs and speak to all the relevant stakeholders – this should also include your suppliers and customers.
Distil these business needs into high-level, functional epics, prioritise what’s most important to your business, and then use you needs to evaluate competing products from different vendors.
Make sure you also cover off non-functionals too - numbers of users, traffic patterns, page views - as these can play a large part in the ongoing costs you’ll incur.
Part of the value proposition of a multi-site platform is the centralised control it gives you. Look for a system with user-friendly dashboards that allows you to easily roll out new web properties with consistent branding, as well as all the standard CMS features such as versioning, SEO, workflow, and multi-language support.
Remember - it’s important to balance the CMS features against what your business actually needs. Too much complexity can quickly make multi-site deployments expensive, as the engineering overhead can increase with each deployment.
As a general rule of thumb, always consider SaaS (Software as a Service) and- Cloud-based vendor solutions first, in order to help optimise costs.
SaaS offerings are consumption-based, which means you only pay for what you use, whilst also having the ability to scale up (and down) quicker than traditional infrastructure.
SaaS service fees include the hidden costs of maintenance and security patching, helping streamline support team and ongoing operating costs. This insulates your business from sudden price rises, such as energy usage, that can be associated with physical data centres where this is sometimes charged in addition to ongoing fees.