I have always said, the Internet is like a mirror and many people like taking a good look at themselves in the mirror. I’ve also said that it is important to have a unique presence on the Internet, so pick a unique name and if you were a Solomon Island entity, pick a .sb ccTLD. It tells a lot about you!
However, the One News Television and the Solomon Star websites hardly tell the non-discerning Internet user anything unique about the two organizations. I’ll admit, they are both media news outlets but that is only where the similarities end. Visiting the revamped websites of both companies – I have to admit – they may have grabbed the same website template off the shelf resulting in the same look, the same feel. Mostly everything is the same except the content. Why has this happened? I am willing to put my hand up and offer my theory.
This is the One News Television website:
And this would be the Solomon Star website, a website that has drawn its usual praise from the Internet surfing public.
You can be forgiven for mistakenly believing that they are the same. Apart from a few minor exceptions, these websites are exactly the same. Let us spend the next few moments highlighting some of the similarities.
1. They were both built on the same fledgling open source Content Management Platform (CMS), Joomla
2. Coincidently, (or otherwise) they both used the same exact template. In Joomla and most other CMS systems available today, templates give your website its feel and look like the examples offered here.
3. Using the same template gives both website the same exact layout and color scheme.
The differences are more subtle but this much we know, both websites were designed by two different companies. Go Man Go is a web design company based out of Sydney, Australia. The One News Television website was originally built by Pointcruz.com, an IT firm in Honiara. I assume they may have upgraded it too but I stand to be corrected. Or could it be that the same developer worked on both websites. Who knows?
Herein lies the downside to CMS systems. As one observer correctly mentioned, they are rigid and in some cases difficult to configure exactly as you would want or need. I concur but CMS systems are to me frameworks that can be used to build your website on as it already provides services and applications that would have otherwise been time consuming to build. That should be the focus of any website developer wanting to use a CMS. It is a tool not the website.
The secret to building a website using a CMS is to know what you want and how you can implement these requirements into a CMS. You set out to making the CMS conform to your requirements.
In this instance, coincidence or not, it does illustrate a normal downside to CMS systems which when plucked off the shelf without adequate work all look the same!