There are indeed many CMS to chose from - from in-house, to commercial and open source.  In-house (home built), as you state, have the worry about agency lock-in, future feature development speed, inability to stay up to date with the technology stack.  Systems out in the wild would typically have a bigger install base, more developers available who are knowledgeable, and flexible support options.  When choosing an implementation partner, there exist smaller agencies out there who have opted for an in the wild system rather than build their own and they may offer greater scalability and more stable long term support than a freelancer.

For example, we typcially use Sitecore or Umbraco (not yet mentioned).

Best of luck, and get in touch if you want to chat.

Matt

www.codehousegroup.com

Joomla - will cater for most of the above but you really need to sit down and work out the whole information architecture thing.

I would start with a migration plan - what goes what stays. Then outline all the functionality you require on a must have would be nice to have. For instance does 'everything' have to reside on the one site or could you just link to it?

Hi

As I have stated earlier we have developed our own homegrown Content Management System which will cater to all your requirements stated above.

Recently we have done a similar website which matches your requirements.

http://www.subcontinentart.com

Once you see the demo of our Content Management System, you can give us your valuable feedback on implementing RevalCMS vs Joomla.

Our CMS is very intutive and does not require any technically skilled people in your orgranization as we would also maintain your website for any future requirements. There are 30 business ready application built for our CMS.

We have a very easy workflow mechanism built into our CMS which is being adapted by a major bank in India (Indian Overseas Bank).

http://www.iob.in

We not only provide a product, but also gaurantee our work for the Successful implementation of your website.

I had said enough, but at the end of the day seeing is believing. If you give us time, we would like to demonstrate our Content Management System REVALCMS to you. We can do this over webex.

Look at our new website http://www.revalsys.com completed integrated with our CMS. No ther CMS can be used to integrate our website so effeciently.

Looking forward to hearing from you soon.

Thank you Ratan and Natasha - Ratan I will have a look at your system but I am quite far down the line with the evals I am already doing now and in a small business with the rest of the marketing mix to worry about unfortunately time to evaluate is scarce; however, thank you very much for your responses.

Natasha thanks for your response - good luck with Umbraco!

One thing that has cropped up is some Opensource systems still require a paid for license and others do not - this is alittle confusing and making the comparing of job estimates difficult - also I thought the whole idea with Opensource was that because the code is open and free to be developed/improved no paid license is required?? Does Joomla require a paid license?

BR

I agree that Joomla is a great free resource for creating CMS driven sites...you could also use Wordpress as a CMS (also free, of course) and take advantage of some of the out-of-the-box SEO benefits in addition to a myriad of plugins to augment the functionality of your site.

A good program that is inexpensive to help you design or re-design a site, and will save it as a theme to be used in Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, DotNet Nuke and others is Artisteer.

I have designed a few sites using this software and Wordpress that have worked out great. Worpress itself is easily installed through most hosting services and their control panels (usually through Simple Scripts or Fantastico).

The Wordpress backend is pretty easy to learn and use as well.  :)