Lately I’ve had a number of clients who insist that a CMS is the only way they’ll have a new site because it ‘will save them so much money’ when they don’t have to get a designer to make changes for them. The majority of them don’t understand that besides the increased up-front costs, there are other considerations down the road that cost both time and money. This is a great article on the hidden costs of running a CMS by Paul Boag of Boagworld.

If a client is going to make a couple of text changes a few times per year and wants Joomla, I try to dissuade them. Big CMS’s are overkill for many small businesses especially when they have one or two CMS editors. They often don’t get that a powerful CMS comes with a big learning curve and has so many features that it can be overwhelming.

For those types of clients, I use one of the tiny page-based CMS’s like Snippetmaster or Flyspeck. They’re cheap, easy to implement and do exactly one thing - let the client edit or add text and images to an existing page.