My parents recently purchased a retail furniture website. They are in the process of hiring a company to redesign the entire page, both front and back. They are both capable of using computers to email and do normal day-to-day tasks, but are relatively new to anything technical at all. Normal tasks take them a long time to accomplish. My question is… what back-end software is the most user friendly. By user friendly, I mean easy for a newbie or non-computer literate person to learn and navigate. I am looking for any recommendations as far as ease of use goes. Thanks for any and all responses, because some proposals have recommended keeping the back-end they currently have (i wish I could say what it is, but I can’t recall right now), but this would not be good because they are having a lot of trouble using it.
I would say Wordpress is probably as good as you can get in regards to usable CMS solutions, it’s free, very flexible, easy to customize and it’s become the industry standard for blogging on the back of how easy to use the system is. That being said you don’t need to limit it to blogs, with a bit of customization you can make it work for any kind of service, even commercial services (which might require an e-commerce solution attached or some good plug-in’s).
It partly depends on how large/complex the site is, and what the site needs to do. Two very popular options these days are to build your site with WordPress (if the site is reasonably simple and mainly consists of new topcs being posted regularly) or ExpressionEngine (for a larger site with lots of sections where content needs to be added or updated).
What you are looking for is a content management system (CMS) and each web company will have their preferred CMS(s). Perhaps the best thing to do is ask them to show you a demo of the CMS they use and see if you like the look of it. Some are free and some cost quite a bit. ExpressionEngine costs a bit, but it is worth the price, so I’d look for a place that uses that.
Thank you for your response. You can see the site at www.pgmod.com It has been around for years and has a decent amount of traffic, but they are going to do a complete overhaul as far as the site format and add a very contemporary/artistic feel to it since it deals in modern furniture. We want something that is advanced but not too complicated for them cause it has definitely been a steep learning curve for them to get used to adding new stock and running other aspects of the site. I’ll definitely look into ExpressionEngine. Thanks for the advice
