This question comes from Ashok, a small business owner in the far west suburbs of Chicago. He's been trying to figure out how to get a website up on his own, and has been looking at hosting providers that have one-click WordPress installation options. Unfortunately, there's no simple response...I'd love to just say "Drupal", but the answer tends to be a lot more complex than that.

Choosing a content management system (CMS) is a difficult strategic decision, but one that'll have implications for your website project over the next several years. It's also a decision that a non-technical do-it-yourself business owner may not be equipped to make. I'll try to make it a little clearer here, since this is question that, in various forms (Drupal vs. Joomla, Drupal vs. Plone, Drupal vs. Dreamweaver) tends to come up very often.

The primary task of a content management system is to separate content from technology. Instead of using a clunky tool (like Dreamweaver) to write your HTML code, and then figuring out how to FTP that code to your server, and then troubleshooting issues when the new page breaks in a particular browser (I'm looking at you, Microsoft), we use a content management system as a platform for non-technical users to add, edit, and delete content. Any competent CMS platform will allow you to do this.

Of course, CMS platforms now offer a ton of other functionality as well. Users can log in, post blog entries, post comments in response to content, participate in forum discussions, use streaming audio and video...the list is fairly long, and there are well over 2,000 modules available for the Drupal CMS alone.

CMS comparisons aside, my advice is as follows:

• If you are building your first website yourself, and have little or no background in working with technology, limit your selection to one of the major open source CMS platforms. These are Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, and Plone. They may have strengths and weaknesses in comparison to each other, but they'll get the job done for a basic web presence. More importantly, they have very strong user communities, and will be around for years to come. You won't find your CMS platform abandoned when you need security updates or a professional consultant to help with the project.
• If you believe you'll need a consultant to help with this site over the next year, it may be worthwhile to approach a consulting team now, and get an idea of what they recommend. It is always better to build a relationship with a consultant you trust than to pick a CMS based on something you read on the internet (yes, including this article). We're Drupal folks, but we've priced "typical" nonprofit website requirements with a strong Joomla developer team at the Nonprofit Software Development Summit, and the results are pretty close. If your trusted consulting folks have a lot of experience with any of the major open source CMS platforms and think it can do the job, it's better to go with their recommendation than try to force them to use an unfamiliar CMS or take your chances with a new team of developers. Good dev teams are hard to find.
• The important part of that last sentence was any of the major open source CMS platforms. No matter how much you trust your consulting team, you may want to make an exception if they're using a proprietary solution they developed in-house, or if they're using a more esoteric CMS solution. Companies go out of business, developers get promoted, retire, shift to other fields, or get hired by other companies with different priorities, and there are literally thousands of abandoned CMS projects, with legacy clients cursing their luck (ask any university department currently stuck with Serena Collage). I recommend not putting your eggs in one basket; it should be easy enough to find a consulting team working with a major CMS platform (there are a lot of us out there).
• If you're not looking for a consultant in the foreseeable future, you may want to talk to one anyway :) You'd be surprised how quickly a successful business needs a design makeover, new web functionality, or a hosting upgrade, and most of us are happy to have conversations with small businesses or nonprofits about their web strategy. You could always just take your consultant out for a beer if you can't afford a longer strategy session, and it might help you make a technology strategy decision that'll save you thousands in the long run.