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As promised to a number of survey respondents, this brief summarizes Communicopia and Learning Point's Vancouver, BC springtime survey of web design firms that likely outsource the CMS and custom application component of their web projects. For those of you who were not involved in the survey, we are providing this qualitative information to support the local web community, to engender debate, and of course to spark your curiosity in Presto CMS. In the survey, we gathered information on the CMS functionality and pricing that firms were interested in, in order to evaluate and shape our own product offering.
CMS Survey Results
We targeted 30 firms for the 16 question telephone survey. Our 11 telephone respondents mainly included large and small web design firms that are likely to outsource CMS work. Our respondents also included a web development firm, and a non-profit CMS consumer. A respondent was typically the CMS contractor for a design firm, or the firm's production manager.
All firms project-managed web projects, half had staff that were involved in CMS implementation, and almost all contracted out the main technical CMS implementation. CMS Implementations per firm averaged about 8 per year.
A third of the firms had settled on a preferred CMS (across the spectrum: Dreamweaver, Pencilcase, Maestro, TheLEVEL, Microsoft CMS, and a few private CMS solutions). A design firm's working relationships with web development firms motivated the choice in some cases; others that were closer to the CMS technology itself spoke of having their priority for a "design-agnostic" CMS, i.e. a CMS that did not compromise their own design work. As well, cost effectiveness and the need for customization came up repeatedly. A frequent comment was that the commercial solutions that fit the needs of a project were too expensive. These three drivers led a number of firms (or their contractors) to focus on providing CMS systems specially built from their own software components for each project, with the open source PHP scripting language being favored as a general framework a few times.
Major frustrations with existing CMS solutions included poor user interfaces, including the dreaded cross-platform HTML WYSIWYG editor incompatibility, or insufficient controls on content area styling. Most CMS's were unable to force compliance with web standards for page coding, usually as a result of offering WYSIWYG editing.
Firms that provided customized solutions felt a greater burden over time for training needs. Some also acknowledged issues around expanding and scaling their solutions over time. The web developer had reservations about the complexity and training required to implement their chosen CMS tool.
We asked respondents about what is important for them in making a CMS recommendation to a client. Cost usually came first, followed by a tie between ease of use and customization requirements; the technical aptitude of client staff was also factored into the decision. Reputation, reliability and support speed of the CMS vendor were mentioned, and I think we can infer that these are baseline requirements.
Most CMS contractors personally preferred an open source licensing model for CMS's, although this didn't always translate over to the CMS choices they were making on behalf of design firms. Lump sum license fees were preferred over monthly payments.
All but the web development firm wanted the CMS vendor to provide direct (and not re-branded) support to their clients.
Our CMS Survey Conclusions
The survey suggests that there are still many opportunities for offering improved service to web design firms by refining, specializing, and consolidating CMS technology and service offerings. There are no hands-down winners in the CMS arena. There is still a tension and a divide between the needs of web designers, web standards enforcement, application developers, and the functionality of available tools. Unless the business rules behind a particular CMS project are simple, costs show up in CMS installation and maintenance, if not in license outlays.
The fact that no design firm had mentioned using 2 or more commercial CMS products suggests that the amount of work involved in knowing, trusting and selling a product is significant, even for larger firms (this we know from personal experience too!) It makes it easier for a design firm and their outside contractor if most of their projects fall within the abilities of a single CMS tool.
We see that short of an open source model, a lump sum license fee is preferred, probably because the outright purchase of a CMS license indicates that CMS has greater customization than the monthly hosting CMS solutions run by 3rd party vendors. Design firms are less concerned about the technology platform underlying the CMS tool, as long as it is stable and common enough to find technicians for.
Some issues, like the compliance of WYSIWYG editor content to stylesheets or web standards, will dog us until 3rd party tools are refined to solve these issues; Most CMS's will benefit from this since they usually incorporate 3rd party tools for free-form content management.
Web design firms usually don't do cookie cutter websites alone; consequently CMS's are called upon to fit in a variety of business rules, or custom applications. Even somewhat complex projects will continue to require a close relationship between design firms and their CMS implementation contractors - a direct relationship that large corporate CMS vendors cannot service economically.
Presto CMS
Learning Point's current and future Presto CMS product have been influenced by what we learned in the above survey. The Learning Point strategy this coming year will be to supply a handful of Vancouver web design firms with Presto CMS services, priced economically. Although our business model isn't an open source, free software approach at this point, we will be sharing a great deal about how our product works in order to attract the interest of other firms.
Also, recognizing the amount of competition in the CMS world, we are dedicated to growing Presto usage in a broader community, but are interested in specializing it to meet particular market niches, e-Learning, and association websites for example. At this point we are not taking a mass market approach - our services will be tailored to meet the exact, customized needs of particular client projects.
We welcome giving in-person demonstrations on location!
Thank you for your consideration,
Regards,
Damion Dooley
Chief Technical Officer
Learning Point Inc.
604 877 0304
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