Online Marketing Blog from Radical

For the longest time in the Web Development world Content Management Systems (or CMS) have been seen as an added “extra”.

To this end many Web Development agencies have invested time and money to develop in-house Content Management Systems to meet their client’s needs. You will probably find a bulleted list on every web development agencies website (including our own) detailing the power of their CMS, and the many features and benefits their system offers over the competition.

My point is this, there is no competition. Or at least there should not be! When I go to google and type “content management system”, apart for a wiki or two I see some familiar urls:

www.joomla.org
www.drupal.org
www.modxcms.com
www.mamboserver.com

When I click through on these links I don’t see dollar, euro or yen signs. I see OPEN SOURCE and COMMUNITY DRIVEN written all over them. Open Source Content Management Systems are everywhere (including this Wordpress Blog). It makes me cringe to think that a small agency employing maybe 4-5 developers would invest the time to develop what will have to be seen as a sub-standard CMS in comparison to the community driven CMS available online. To take such an offering and charge a client a premium for “upgrades” is nothing short of daylight robbery.

The creation of community supported and developed Content Management Systems means win win for clients and developers. By supporting an open sourced project through code/snippet sharing, and the occasional donation :), we can offer our clients a FREE to use Content Management System that could easily have 3-4 years development time by hundreds of developers. What small agency could possibly bring the same resources to bear on an in-house solution? If there is an argument to say: “What about bespoke CMS where the client has very tailored requirements”, I would simply say that you have not investigated the open source solutions enough. It’s painfully easy to add new modules to MODx to allow you to do anything you like and still keep it all packaged up in the same CMS. These modules and snippets can then be shared (NOT TRADED!) to the community to drive the whole project forward.

Would you like to buy a Content Management System? It has 10 bullet points, 100 amazing features, was worked on by 1000 developers…..and it’s FREE to use!