CMS standards

6 June 2008

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.

Categories: Web Design / Dev
Tags: cms, content management, drupal, plone, wordpress
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3 Responses to “CMS standards”

On June 6th, 2008 at 4:34 pm , Ian wrote:

Hi Di,

Check out this CMS, pretty simple and intuitive I think. Not quite the finished article though.

http://www.madebyfrog.com/

I totally agree that most CMS’s are WAY overcomplicated!

Ian
On June 6th, 2008 at 5:53 pm , Di wrote:

Cheers for that Ian, I’ll check it out.
On June 27th, 2008 at 3:16 pm , Leslie wrote:

I use WordPress a LOT. The more I use it, the more powerful I find it. With the plugins for multiple users, SEO title tags and the like, I find it every bit as powerful as a “real” CMS - I’ve been corrected before for calling it other than a “real” CMS, and I’m beginning to see the point. The fact that WP is so perfect for one-user sites is what makes it ideal for me, but I use it for bigger projects too. I used to charge more for installing WP (or any other CMS) than for creating a static site, but not so any more. I’m comfortable enough with the process and the package that I can install WP in less time that it would take me to create a static framework. The stylesheet takes the same amount of time as that for a static site, so I now charge the same, which naturally means more people want the CMS.

CMS standards

3 Responses to “CMS standards”

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