Design studios in Belfast especially, go to great lengths to design and develop their own cms, solely so they can charge the client more money for a “solution” they don’t need. The “solution” is so complicated to use that the client ends up paying the company to manage the content for them.

They have a rip off mentally about them, the customers ‘value for money’ is a low priority…..

99% of these projects that I have been invloved with, there has always been a cheaper ‘off the shelf’ alternative that actually worked, but there’d be no telling the client that.

Colin’s totally right; the majority of Design Studios DO have a rip-off mentality about them. do a search for free cms’s on such sites as hotscripts.com, and it’ll show you how many are on offer. But if the clients can’t be arsed doing their research, or spending a fraction of the cost training one of their own up to have half an idea how to download and set up a free cms, they deserve to be ripped off. In my opinion, the clients are equally at fault, throwing money at a design studio for a ‘quick fix’ solution, rather than spending the time to do it themselves. And so the cycle continues…

“In my opinion, the clients are equally at fault”
I have to disagree there Conor - at Voodoo or Argento for example, they both knew a lot about selling shoes or jewellery on the high street but very little about IT, the internet and eCommerce. They go to the ‘experts’ for help - going by your rational I should know about plumbing before I hire a plumber etc. These clients spend a lot of money and should expect professionalism and trust from the developers.
I also thought of another interesting side to this - when the client happens to be a public sector client and they are speanding *our* money shouldn’t they be using the most open and competitive technologies available? How is it in the public interest to develop a system in say coldfusion when you know that pretty much only one company in the region really uses coldfusion? If you leave that particular company then you have to seriously consider developing a new system and yet more expense.

There is a balance to be struck.
‘none of these companies have the balls to implement an free-software solution’

That is 100% the wrong attitude to take with any client. You say that high street clients know very little about IT.
Then using an opensource solution such as Joomla is not a good idea. Likewise providing a solution such as .net nuke is also a dangerous path to take.

Every one of these products I have come across are made as 100% flexible cms’s. As are almost all off the shelf/open source cms products.

Now try and provide a high street retailer with a wide loose system like that. It will never be used, it is too complicated. If you want me to go further I will explain the process of adding simple text in either and you will see the complexities.

I agree that wordpress is astoundingly simple and a monkey could use it. That is because it isnt a cms as we are discussing. It isnt a loose system. It was built with a task in mind… blogging. Then they restricted the hell out of it. Using the 37 Signals theory of less is more.

But it is not a cms. By no standards.

I agree ‘certain companies’ use code like coldfusion to trap clients. But the majority of companies dont do that and they also dont strictly build their own cms. They give themselves a flat bed on which to build a bespoke solution.

The things you like about wordpress can be built into a cms this way. The simplicity, only the links you need. A lack of geeky descriptions.

You may pay a little extra for a bespoke solution but if you choose the right firm you will get a wordpress like cms that you could teach your granny to use.

Well there are 2 issues here. Firstly by picking a well known but more complex system I hardly thing it fair to label free software CMS’s “dangerous”. For many basic clients requiring only a simple system then Joomla or Mambo or DotNetNuke are perhaps too complicated but that doesn´t get past my other point about Wordpress.

Dave: “But it is not a cms. By no standards.”
Well it is and infact has been since Version 1.5. The link in the post demonstrates how easy it is for a developer to tweak Wordpress to take advantage of its CMS capabilities.

Dave: “They give themselves a flat bed on which to build a bespoke solution”
Well thats the problem, whether your web developers decide to use Coldfusion, PHP or .net - have a bespoke solution and you’ll have problems if you ever consider changing developer. The other point is that a lot of the development work out there is the same. For example we have 26 local councils in the north, they all have exactly the same remit and have to carry out the same jobs so why do they all need to spend our money on developing a different bespoke solution. Surely some sort of open-source framework would be better? Even forgetting councils why does a community arts group or a small business require a bespoke solution? they often don’t but are sold it nevertheless.

Not all projects are alike. For a small three/five section website, with very few features then yes wordpress would be fine.

But if you try and explain to Sally May at the local flower shop why when she wants to login and change the phone number on the homepage she see’s ‘add new posts’ and ‘recent comments’. Then you are not providing a usable system.

Then at the other end of the scale you have Tech Corp. The person that edits their site is the marketing manager, she doesnt have a degree in IT but isnt computer illiterate.
She log’s into the off the shelf .Net nuke system and its panel layout, image upload management and page long module system scares the hell out of her.

There are horses for courses, as a website development firm you should offer off the shelf options for cheaper. But they may not always be right.
At least with a bespoke solution sally May logs in and see’s her three sections as links and when see clicks on them she see’s a friendly word style text editor. Most businesses wont mind paying a little extra for that to be developed for them.

As for Public service companies spending tax payers money on bloated systems…Dont get me started.

fight! fight! fight!

“But if you try and explain to Sally May at the local flower shop why when she wants to login and change the phone number on the homepage she see’s ‘add new posts’ and ‘recent comments’. Then you are not providing a usable system.”

Yes but if you were to hack the wordpress system for another use it wouldn’t be that dificult to amend the navigation for it new purpose. Such a system could work for a variety of clients. I don’t suggest that such solution would be approriate for all clients but I would still say. Go throw the portfolio of any of these companies for the last 6 months and find one that couldnt of used this idea onstead of their own proprietry system.

nerds, the lot of you, a pack of nerds… nerds in heat!