No manual policy

How to choose a cms
Just my 2 cents

In my career so far I have come across many Content Management Systems. My goal with this list is to provide a few pointers, things to avoid when looking into a cms product for your website. I will not be naming (and bashing) any specific systems as this is intended as more of a general guide.

Things to avoid in a CMS

1. Open source
Although I am a big fan of open source software I have yet to see an open source system that I feel is good to use for websites. An open source Blog system is a great idea, use it! saves you a lot of time. Choose a nice template and blog away. But websites are much more complicated, they often require a lot of very specific functions or effects for your specific website and its design. This results in 2 problems: open source cms's are big, bulky, slow and full of functionality you will likely NEVER use. And any custom work you want for your site will likely cost a lot more time to do in an open source system than the same work in a cms built specifically for your website.

2. Recurring fees
Although here i should be clear that i am talking about full custom websites. There are a few sites you can get a decent template site with cms for x a month which is a great solution for small companies and starters. If you find yourself paying a recurring fee for a full custom website built specifically for you then you are likely paying for the development of functionality that you will never need or use.

3. Manuals
Any CMS needing a manual is too complicated for the average user. If you have a web-developer to take care if your website then fine (but why would you need a cms then?). Avoid over complicated systems that require a manual and you will spend a lot less time wondering and reading about how you should use your cms and more time actually managing your content.

4. None-PHP / MySQL products
Any website and cms not programmed in php is likely going to cost a lot more for hosting as it will likely require expensive Microsoft licenses. PHP is a world wide known language with many developers available to you. The programs required to load php sites are free for everyone. (Although you still have to pay for storage, bandwidth and hosting services of course).

5. Not Search Engine Optimised / Bad code structure
I still see many CMS's out there that are based on outdated code and are just not optimized for   such as google. Being found in google is getting more and more important for many websites and to get the most out of your search engine rank the site needs to be optimised from the ground up, this means the code of the CMS needs to be up to scratch and fully optimised.

As I mention i have yet to see a good open source CMS platform for websites. There are a couple of paid systems available that are OK but in the end its all up to the web-developer and how he handles it.

I have 2 ways of making a CMS website:
1. Use a commercial or open source CMS but remove most of the functionality and files leaving only what the client really needs. This only works on systems that have been programmed correctly and can handle missing large chunks of their code. Spending a lot of time cleaning up a third party cms makes a free open source cms almost as expensive as a custom cms (and usually a lot less stable) however so its not something I do very often.

2. Use a framework instead of a "ready to use" cms product. A framework is more of a skeleton, a base structure for web applications allowing much more freedom for developing the rest. Using a framework (my own framework combined with a couple of open source libraries) saves me a lot of development time while at the same time allowing me to be flexible in the developing of all custom work for a specific website and cms.

I have never needed to provide a manual with any of my projects. The available options are clear and minimal. There is no functionality that a user does not need and everything is made to order for a specific purpose within a specific website, design and goal.