CMS standards

At Oxeye Daisy we often build small websites (10ish pages). For a website of this size we may use WordPress and bend it into a CMS. While not ideal it does work quite well for our customers who want the convenience of being able to update their site without shelling out a lot of money for something bespoke.

Recently we’ve had to make some updates to a couple of CMS websites that were built by other agencies. Both times this involved learning each CMS and their idiosyncrasies. This is when using something ’standard’ would have been helpful. The only problem is I’ve tried Plone, Drupal and various others and found them to be way over complicated. I mean, if I can’t figure our how to add a page to a section of a website how can I expect customers to use it? A good CMS should be something that someone just ‘gets’, clear, intuitive, simple.

I think we’re getting near the point of having to build our own small scale CMS, which of course leads back to my previous problem with non-standard CMSes. I’ll be creating the same problem for someone else in the future. Unless I can find a straight forward off the shelf CMS this is what I can see my next in-house project being.