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Bespoke CMS - bad news for you, good news for your agency
Blogger and freelance web designer Rob Cannon takes you through what he sees as the pros behind the cons that sell in-house content management systems to their clients.
Ten years ago content management systems were rare. If you were a web designer or developer and could offer clients the ability to administer their own website, you were ahead of the game.
Even the idea that non technical people could update their website’s content easily and quickly was new. So a lot of agencies developed their own bespoke content management systems as a way of providing an important additional service to clients. What’s amazing is how many agencies still try to push these systems on their clients, because in the current climate there’s simply no justification for doing so.
If an agency tries to tell you that you should use their in-house content management system today, they’re doing you a disservice. They’re taking advantage of your lack of knowledge of web technology by claiming that their bespoke service is a good deal for you.
In a world of widely available, top quality, open source and commercial content management systems, there’s no upside to using a bespoke system. All the advantages lie with the agency, not the client…which of course is why they try to sell them to you!
Open Source And Commercial Systems Offer Better Quality
I’ve experienced the pain of using proprietary content management systems developed by a single agency. They’re generally terrible. Difficult to use, they lack extensibility and flexibility, and can be clunky and primitive. A decade ago when there were few other options, they were a good deal. Many of them don’t appear to have moved on from that point.
Compare that to the widely available systems, both open source and commercial. These products are all fighting it out in a highly competitive market. That competition forces them to continually update and upgrade, improving functionality and usability. What’s more, they’re working with teams who are dedicated purely to the creation and improvement of a content management system, not a design or development agency that’s throwing something together as an additional “service”.
Open source options have the additional advantage of being free. In this case free definitely doesn’t mean poor quality. The likes of WordPress, Drupal, Joomla! and many others have a huge community of coders continually working to improve the systems. These content management systems are stable, flexible and of sufficient quality that major corporate and government clients like Ford (WordPress), Mattel (Drupal), the US Army (Joomla!) are happy to base their websites off these systems.
Open source competition also forces commercially available content management systems to raise their game. If there are such good services out there for free then a widely available content management system that costs money is going to have to be exceptional quality to compete effectively. From easy to implement options such as ExpressionEngine, suitable for small scale sites, to comprehensive full solutions for major corporate accounts, such as Sharepoint and EPiServer, commercial options are also excellent.
Why A Bespoke System Is A Bad Deal For You
The most important reason that a bespoke content management system is a bad deal is because it ties the client to the agency that provided the original service. It locks the client in, and reduces their options. That raises a number of issues;
How do you fix a problem?
You’re probably going to have to talk to the original agency, even if you no longer have a working relationship. They developed the content management system, they’re probably the only people who are going to be able to fix it quickly. Your alternative is going to be paying developers who have no prior knowledge of the code, to try and identify and fix a system they haven’t seen before.
How do you implement new functionality?
You’ve realised the importance of social networking to your business, so you want to add a Twitter feed to your site. Perhaps you’d like to add some video functionality, or a blog. Widely available content management systems, whether open source or commercial, respond to demand. That means there’s probably a “plugin” that adds that functionality to your site quickly and easily. Not the case with a bespoke content management system; you’re stuck until the agency that owns it decides to take the time to implement the functionality (…if they ever do!).
You’re Locked In
You’re trapped by a bespoke content management system in a number of ways. You’re trapped with your original agency for your future web design and development needs. That’s probably why they provided you with the system in the first place, it forces long term repeat business that’s good for them.
It’s not just the agency you’re stuck with though. What happens when you need to replace your own webmaster? There’s not likely to be many people out there who are familiar with your content management system. If you were using a widely acknowledged system, however, there’d be a huge pool of talent. People experienced and skilled with administering, designing and developing for both open source and commercial alternatives. A bespoke system doesn’t just tie you to an agency, it massively limits your own talent pool.
Bespoke Systems Should Simply Be Avoided
Any design or development agency you work with should be able to offer you a widely available content management system, whether open source or commercial. A good designer or developer should be comfortable working with several different systems, so they can offer a solution that’s best suited to your particular needs.
Even if you have very specialized requirements, commonly available content management systems are the best option. You’re far better having a developer create a custom component for a well known content management system than accepting that a bespoke option is best. That’s assuming that there isn’t already a component out there that you can simply plug into your content management system; with such a large community of developers, open source software has hundreds of such plugins.
Whenever a design agency insists that their own in-house content management system is the best option for you, query that claim. With such a scope of available options that are widely supported, there’s no justification for offering a bespoke option that’s agency specific.
Robin Cannon is a freelance web designer. He runs fog of eternity website design, and is a regular blogger and social networker. A version of this opinion piece first appeared on http://www.fogofeternity.com
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A customized CMS can be far more advanced than a premade CMS.
The next Ebay or Facebook will probably be something custom, and not built off of wordpress.
What a narrow minded, arrogant article.
Open source will always play second fiddle to a well developed, well documented, expertly executed bespoke CMS framework.
I often find that those developers who extol the virtues of OS the loudest are often those who understand the least about their clients genuine business needs and wider marketing / business strategy.
Your blinkered, ignorance is typical of most back-bedroom developers I have encountered.
Wow,
Yes, really useful this post…and not only for beginners!
I beg to differ.
Yes I am quite happy to offer, magento, Wordpress even Joomla to a client (although I've been burnt previously) if it's suitable. Our repertoire covers many platforms. These are great for getting a standard site off the ground quickly for low budget, but here are your negatives:
1. Security: I have yet to date use anything open source or paid for that hasn't been hacked (actually, maybe later versions of wordpress if your careful with plug-in choice). Even if you keep it up-to-date the source code is out there for hackers to pour over and scrutinize for holes. I've seen blogs full of porn, e-commerce hosting fake bank phishing pages, CMS supplying link-juice to illegal content. Check your access logs how many URLs are called for known software by bots just to see if it exists, why?
2. Efficiency: "My website is slow, why?", simple: bloat - your site is running software designed to cover many bases - I've had to bump PHP memory limit to 40+MB for some software before - that quickly uses up a servers resources. Next question "Can you speed it up?" Here comes the days of working implementing Server caching mechanisms with Apache, or worse still hacking the core - I've been there.
3: "I love my site, but now I want it to do this...". Great, you got them off the ground quickly, but now they want special functionality that the core doesn't supply, in fact the schema doesn't allow for it - you can do it, but it's gonna be expensive, the plug-in architecture doesn't go far enough so your gonna have to hack the core, bye-bye new updates. This is the single biggest problem.
An agency who develops their own software should (in my opinion) develop in a framework - as mentioned earlier. So there is no tie-in. Open Source and paid for has it's place - but so does bespoke and from my experience it's the larger more complex builds that require bespoke. I don't mean large as in web page count or visitor page views, but as in data types, integration with internal systems, quick manipulation of user path through site. complex relationships between data types in the admin section to minimise webmaster input and duplication of effort.
As a developer that has both had his own agency and built his own CMS, I have to say that its not all the agencies fault.
Riddle me this...
What about those clients that say they "don't want something that is free and off the shelf"?? They do exist. Which rules out OS CMS systems, because they seem them as cheap and undervalue what you, as the agency, does with them.
Strewth!!! I always knew there were a lot of important things that I know sod all about, but this thread just makes me feel even more like a country cousin than ever. Interestingly, most of the comments are under the real names of the author. Not like the pseudonymous cat-fights which take place elsewhere on How Do. I mean, who the f**k is "Watcher" for example?
hmm, this is what happens when you let someone who knows nothing about website development post an article by someone who knows nothing about website development.
I think Rob just committed professional suicide and made us all realise that how-do performs very little vetting or background research on its submissions.
The UK has some amazing developers producing innovative and highly creative work, and this kind of article is insulting and destructive to that industry.
A good design/development agency will spend considerable time consulting with the client for their exact requirements and deliver them a solution to match, for most SME's this would conclude with a custom built website that is tailored for their customer base and market.
If we were to follow Rob's highly cynical and very quite frankly incorrect advice the web would be awash with open source cms templates with a splash of istock thrown together in 10 minutes.
I fully agree with Darren Ratcliffe. You (Robin) are obviously not web or development savvy and have obviously never worked on any sizable or demanding real world projects. If you had you would know from experience that there is still a massive need for bespoke CMS systems. What do you think most of the medium and big players use - Amazon or Flickr on Joomla ! Get real.
Your argument for bespoke tying you into a web agency is also nonsense. Any agency really worth their salt can migrate over a bespoke CMS to another. If they can’t then avoid them like the plague as they obviously have no real development skills in house. Most bespoke systems are written in PHP or .NET and any accomplished developer should be able to work out how all the code and database tables work.
My advice is to get some help when you write your next article from someone who actually knows the industry because this article is factually incorrect on many levels.
Well Rob, you've either had very bad experience with agencies offering in-house CMS tools... or you're not the most web-savvy of designers!
Granted, open-source CMS systems do have their advantages and indeed their place, but using an in-house system opens up the scope for much more freedom and creativity.
Both have a place within the industry, and it's up to the company providing the solution to make sure their customer get what is right for them!
I've seen a couple of myths on here.
1 - Documentation, the single worst example of lack of documentation we've had to deal with was a Drupal site, where the previous "developer" had added custom modules, hacked some modules and hacked the core with virtually no documentation ( the odd comment in the code was the extent).
2 - This idea that a custom CMS is confusing for the next developer, a bit of generalization, a CMS made from PHP spaghetti code usually is confusing, however most developers use a framework, a RoR CMS (for example) is generally not very difficult to comprehend as it uses a framework we know, it uses MVC, it usually uses many plugins that are common and not any less confusing to a RoR developer than a module is to a Druapl one.
3 - "lock in" - You're not locked in to a RoR, Djanjo, CakePHP (and so on) based site any more than a Joomla, Drupal, etc one.
I'd also address something which hasn't been mentioned - performance, I always find it amusing that Drupal for example is targeted at community sites, yet these sites are exactly the sort of site that Drupal is useless for if they get busy. Drupal performs like a dog if you can't make use of tons of caching, try running a busy forum using Drupals effort or doing a Digg like site, it is hopeless if the site gets any traffic cos Drupal can't cache its way out of trouble on these sort of things.