Choosing the best content management system to use for your website platform can be a challenging task. There are hundreds of different cms choices and price ranges for cms platforms.

Before you make a decision on which cms software to use you should definitely take some time to ask yourself this question. What do you want your website to do? Consider what you wish to accomplish with your website and which features you desire on your site.

In my experience there's no right or best cms platform out there. Instead there are the best content management systems based on certain criteria that you wish your website to achieve.

One of the best websites to compare content management systems side by side is at: http://www.opensourcecms.com/

There you'll be able to take a variety of (free) open source cms systems for a test drive and see which one is best suited for your needs.

During my content management system research which seemed to go on for ages I've narrowed my choices down to three of my favorite free cms platforms and have given a short review below.

I use Joomla for most of my content websites as it has a huge developer group, it's open source and they are tons of addons. Joomla CMS has tons of free Joomla templates to give your site a unique look and it can be made very SEO friendly.

Get Joomla at: http://joomla.org/

Drupal comes in a close second for a choice for a content management system due in large part to its amazing SEO properties and clean URL's. Drupal sites have been known to rank well in the search engines but seem limited in their customization unless you are skilled at coding.

Drupal uses what are called modules, nodes, themes, blocks, taxonomy and menus in it's cms. They can be a little confusing to setup and it my time spent with Drupal it seems to take more time to get accustomed to.

Get Drupal at: http://drupal.org/

My favorite blog platform by a long shot is Wordpress. Wordpress is loved by the search engines and it's URL's are clean and keyword specific. There are a fantastic amount of Wordpress themes to choose from to tailor the appearance of your site. Wordpress blogs can also be easily monetized with the use of a payperclick plugin.

Get Wordpress at: http://wordpress.org/