Is SharePoint 2013 an effective CMS for a public facing corporate website?

It is important to understand the following: Sharepoint is the logical extension of MS Office from a local computer or small group environment, to a wide LAN or Internet environment. So said, you must realise that you are going to pay for a wide and powerful set of tools... for MS Office documents. If you plan to heavily use documents for your public site, then it's okay. If not, be advised: you are going to have a heavy  imposed servitude that is too expensive if you don't really take an extensive advantage of those tools. It's like buying an omnibus to go shopping when you could go to the mall driving your SUV. As an MS Office extension, Sharepoint should be used when the ratio of editors vs readers is no less than 0.01 and ideally at least 0.1, and you have many (really many) live documents along the time that need to be discussed and edited by teams rather than individuals. (A person writting a document after a meeting and just having approbation from other meeting attendants is not a fitting scenario for the late). Big suites are expensive, run with rigid (although many) templates, and are not optimised for the public internet. Instead, they run greatly in structured organisations, with professional IT support, and committed users. They support well intranet and extranet environments. Templates can be customised by users or developers, sometimes at the risk of being incompatible with future releases of the product. If you plan to use Sharepoint for other duties, you can take advantage of it and run an extranet. A public site probably will better done with small tools like Wordpress and Drupal. Data can be exported from your corporate tools by means of web services developed by you Microsoft Certified Provider, and integrated cheaply by cute PHP developers. If you let you web provider to do a good job, they will provide you with enough templates to fulfil your needs. Of course, you are going the hear bad things about every product you consider to use. When talking about mature products as Sharepoint or Wordpress, that happens when they are used for other purposes different than those they were designed for. Or because the customer didn't really know what was buying.

You don't need to setup or design anything for your website. If you don't where to start, is a good place to start. It's content management panel is the awesome. Your website will work smooth and without headaches. Choose a template, update your logo, upload your work and create your pages. That's all. Your website will be ready in one day with a a little effort. I'm a new Squarespace customer, but my experience is really good. Try a free trial.

Honestly, Sharepoint is a fantastic internal collaboration platform but stretching it to service a very important marketing tool such as your website is ill advised. It really comes down to your philosophy and capability for investment. The low cost product option is to get Drupal and hire a few developers to build and maintain the CMS moving forward. The issue is that Drupal developers are expensive and tough to keep around with the job market the way it is. The other option is to go with a commercial product that has an upfront cost but allows the Marketers to control the website without needing technical skills. If you do decide that this route is preferred, I can confidently suggest Percussion CMS as a good option to look at. We're focused on eliminating technical barriers to allow more people to access and have a voice with the website. To give you an idea, we're deploying our CMS at Sony Pictures Entertainment and they seem like a good use case to what you are talking about: multiple territories, brand integrity, support multi-lingual, multiple installs and easy integration with Sharepoint for portals. Obviously I'm biased here but I'm also the first to admit if we're not the best fit for a company if there are strategies that don't fit our mold and would suggest an alternative vendor. Hope this helps! You can reach me on Quora or here for more info:

If you already have SharePoint, feel comfortable with it, and most importantly, have the internet license, then there is nothing wrong at all with using SharePoint for your public facing website. I have built many public facing sites in SharePoint that I have been able to train users to maintain. From that perspective, I prefer SharePoint to a platform like Wordpress because you can set the site up to be editable in the browser directly and via lists, rather than forcing users to go into a separate admin site like Wordpress does. I am a SharePoint pro so I am biased due to my knowledge of the platform, I know how to make it do exactly what I want quite easily. If you need something enterprise level that can be integrated into an existing stack, one that is Microsoft heavy, go for SharePoint. If that is not the case, then SharePoint might very well be overkill, you just need to figure out exactly what you need and see which platform best integrates.

Microsoft claims that SharePoint is the fastest growing product in company history and there are a number of Fortune 500 companies using it for their external websites including UPS, Chrysler, ConocoPhilips, Kraft Foods, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Viacom and many others. With the recent release of SharePoint 2013 revealing a new user-friendly design and features such as enterprise social networking, refined collaboration tools, and mobility, there is sure to be a new wave of businesses adopting or upgrading their SharePoint system. Check out Robert Stark's article below to get you started. https://www.prokarma.com/blog/2014/09/19/why-and-how-you-should-define-sharepoint-strategy