MNteractive.com

Another quote to add to the bag of goodies. This one came out a few months ago. I remember reading it, but forgot about if for a while until just recently, when I was discussing CMS solutions again with some people. This is from Jefferey Veen:

Open source content management software sucks. It sucks really badly. The only things worse is every commercial CMS I’ve used. But it really doesn’t have to be that way.

He’s absolutely right. The state of the CMS software market is one of bloated crappiness. It seems as if there are as many CMS products out there as there are web sites, and none of the products really address the core needs of web site owner.

Now, this isn’t necessarily the fault of the CMS vendor. In many ways, CMSs simply can’t be made into a commodity. Everyone has a unique need.

That said, CMS vendors could do a lot more to not only improve their products, but–and perhaps more importantly–improve their marketing/sales skills.

I recently had a conversation with The Head Lemur about what makes all CMS vendor sites universally crappy (IMHO).

Quoting myself from his blog:

When we spent a year researching CMS products for our organization, most of the information I truly wanted was nowhere to be found on most sites:

• is it a hosted solution? shrink wrapped? Both?
• what is the true cost? (NOT the ‘call for quotes’ crap)
• what is the admin interface?
• where is the free download to try it on our own servers?
• what is the technology platform it is built upon?
• is there a documented API?
• is there documentation?
• where is the user-to-user support forum (if there even is one)?
• how do does it work (step-by-step overview from making templates to
  setting up user roles…)

Seems simple enough. The basic specs of the product would seem perfectly suited for a web site that supposedly is trying to sell said product.

Well, as it turns out, the head lemur is one of id To Blog’ bloggers (see Google). An interesting marketing idea. Well, Marqui picked up on the list and actually responded.

The answers were…OK. Yet, reading through the article, I still was hit with a sense of “we’ll use lot’s of vague terms to describe a rather technical product.” (Campaign calendar? Paperless brochure?) I concede that a lot of CMS solutions are sold to middle management where noncommital, dilbertesque terminology is a wicked sales tool. But it seems like they’re spending more time trying to vaguely define Content Management in non threatening language rather than explicitly stating why their product is any different than the other 1000 products on the market.

In the end, I still think the best advice I can give anyone looking at CMS products is to look, but don’t buy. Build your own from scratch. It won’t be perfect, but it will be yours and from the start it will be infinitely more tailored to your needs than any of these other products.