Choose a CMS around your team’s real work

Describe what people will actually publish

List real content: service pages, news, records, documents, languages and media. For each type, identify useful fields, relationships and update frequency. A demonstration with an empty page will not reveal the difficulties of a long record, translation or correction.

Identify who writes, reviews, approves and publishes. Ask the future team to create a page, save a draft, fix a link, replace an image and find the previous version. Permissions should reflect those responsibilities rather than rely on a shared administrator account.

• Three representative items to recreate.
• Editing and approval owners.
• Draft, publication and correction steps.

Compare the same scenario in each candidate

Use a short scorecard and perform the same task in two or three plausible systems. Check editing, preview, templates, URLs, translations, image alternatives and search. Record what is native, what needs an add-on and what needs custom development.

Assess the public website separately: speed, component accessibility, mobile behaviour and control over generated HTML. A comfortable editor is insufficient if the result is heavy or hard to fix. The website brief guide helps set criteria before the demonstration.

Cost the operation and the exit

Add hosting, subscriptions, add-ons, maintenance, backups, training and editing time. For a hosted product, check plan limits and data retrieval. For a managed installation, assign updates, dependencies and incidents. Total cost depends on architecture and contract, not merely the entry price.

Request a test export of content, media, URLs and metadata, then check what can actually be reused. A text export is not necessarily a restorable website backup. The WordPress export documentation illustrates this distinction for that system; adapt the test to your choice.

• Total cost and update owner.
• Export format and completeness.
• Ability to recreate a page outside the chosen system.

Keep the evidence behind the decision

Record the tested scenario, gaps, adaptations and who accepted each trade-off. Choose a system that meets the priority scope with sustainable maintenance, then pilot a real page before modelling the entire site.

Keep content ownership within the organisation and document handover. At acceptance, perform routine tasks without the supplier: edit, publish, revert and export. Observable independence is more useful than a product feature list.