Five open source tools to enhance your web presence

It is important to know that every business needs to have a web presence. Whether you are a small local startup or an ever-growing reputed company, it is vital to be visible online as the Internet is such a huge part of our everyday lives. But at the same time, it is just as important to know that owning a web presence isn’t enough; you need to have a good, very positive web presence. This may seem a daunting task, but there are plenty of tools out there that can help you build a perfect website and connect positively with prospective clients and customers.

Today, we are looking at five open source tools that will help you make your web presence easy to create and excellent to interact with. Let’s take a look at them.

WordPress

WordPress is renowned as a top of its class, popular content management platform for web blogging, but it can also be used as an excellent business platform. It has many add-ons and extensions that all help you use the basis of the site to build upon and create a very high-quality e-commerce tool. The platform includes a convenient interface that makes it a great place to build your website, and many of the add-ons are written to be used by anyone of different skill levels. Also, there are pre-made themes that you can choose depending on your brand’s style.

Drupal

Drupal is another free open source platform for building a perfect website. Again, like WordPress, it can be used as a simple blogging network. But unlike WordPress that is great for comparatively smaller and simpler programming needs, Drupal focuses on creating much bigger multi-author sites. This platform has much more power behind it and can create more complex designs and hold more content. If your current website just can’t cope with the traffic it is bringing, or you can’t find the features you need on the platform you have, then maybe moving your business to Drupal is a good idea for you.

Joomla

Again, just like WordPress and Drupal, Joomla provides you with a platform that helps you build your web presence. However, Joomla is a step up in how advanced and technical you can make your presence online. Joomla allows you to build an online store, creating both the front-end that customers will interact with and the back-end where you can manage what going on and what traffic you are bringing. It has an extensive add-on collection that gives almost any web-page function you are looking to add. The platform also already includes built-in functions like banner management for creating and managing on page advertisements.

Xoops

Xoops is definitely not an option for the faint of heart, it can be a challenging platform for those who have only handled the simple workings of the likes of WordPress and Drupal, but it is worth the research and quick learning. Xoops helps you build a website that you want specifically for your business. It allows you to add many features and manage them all right from one single place. There are expansions available for your website that let you add the likes of private messages and user profiles as well as many other features that other simpler platforms just can’t offer.

Bluefish

At the far another end of the spectrum from WordPress and Drupal is a cross-platform code editing software called Bluefish. This type of tool is for those who have an experience in HTML coding and source-code editing. The tool is packed full of features and not only offers a wide range of extensive features but also has the power to run them all easily. It handles multi-thread and multi-document support, syntax highlighting, spell checker and side bar options.