This is one of the most common questions asked, but it is probably as vague as asking “what is the best kind of horse?” The answer is of course, it depends what you want to do with it.

There are a multitude of different systems available now and all have some good points and some areas that they are less than perfect in, but often, despite having so many systems available that can just be modified, we have to build the website from scratch.

This is because a website which is purpose-built is built to do only the functionality required and so it runs faster, compared to an off-the-shelf system that has a multitude of features that you don’t want and some you have to modify to use.

But often an off-the-shelf solution is best. This website for instance is a Wordpress blog. It literally took 30 minutes to set up and another hour to do the custom logo on the header and replace the standard file. It uses a standard template called ‘iNove’ which can be easily loaded from the back end – and it is literally the best solution for my requirements:

I want a blogging engine I can post information on and get it out to the online community. I want something which is SEO friendly (and Wordpress has some good SEO plugins), has a Google site map and is easy to customise for my basic requirements.

Now if I wanted to sell a whole lot of products, or have an integrated forum, or have a membership area or have a back end where I could see subscribers and communicate with them, it would be a different story. I could probably find enough plug ins and modify them with code and front end script and do pretty well anything, but the basic system was not designed for that and it would not be the best solution.

Something like Business Catalyst (Good Barry) might be better. If I wanted to catalog thousands of products and have them appear in different ways in different parts of the site, I might be better to use MySource Matrix. If I wanted a sophisticated shopping cart with all the features: upsell, shipping options etc. and just a few static pages, then I would probably be better to use a shopping cart engine like X-cart and so on.

You don’t put a Thoroughbred in the gym to strengthen it so it can pull carts and you don’t try and make a Clydesdale run faster to put it on the racetrack – they could never be as good as the horse that is bred for the job.