Your In-House Content Management System Is A Con

It’s a throw back to the days when open source wasn’t a big deal, and content management systems were rare. You were ahead of the game as a web designer or developer if you could offer content management to clients. The very idea of non-technical people being able to update their own website content easily and quickly. Crazy, huh? So lots of companies developed their own bespoke content management systems as a way of providing an additional service to bring in clients.

Move forward ten years, though, and I’m stunned at how many companies still use their in-house content management systems as a selling point. They’re taking advantage of the lack of knowledge of potential clients. There’s no upside for a client to use an agency’s own content management system. But it’s a great scam if you can get them to agree.

In-House Content Management Systems Aren’t Very Good

I’ve had the joys of using a few content management systems that were exclusive to a particular developer or agency. They’re usually terrible. Difficult to use, lacking extensibility, clunky and primitive. They may very well have been great a decade ago when there weren’t other options, but most of them haven’t moved on from that point.

Open source options are so much better. WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, ExpressionEngine and the many other options are fighting it out in a competitive market. It means they’re continually improving their function and usability; they *have* to. Luckily, the open source community means they’ve got a huge pool of coders who can contribute to ensure those improvements are implemented quickly and effectively.

And that open source competition means that the paid solutions have also had to raise their game. If there’s good stuff out there for free, then widely available CMS that expect you to pay for them better be *damn* good if they’re going to succeed commercially.

They’re A Crap Deal For The Client

In-house content management systems are a pain because they tie the client to the agency that provided the original service. That raises more than one problem;

Who do you pay to fix a problem?

The original agency. They developed the tool, they’re probably the only ones who can fix it quickly.

How do you implement new functionality?

Say you’ve realized the importance of a Twitter feed to your business, or adding a blog, video, podcasts, or any other new idea. Widely available content management systems, whether open source or commercial, need to respond to demand, so they implement new functionality. Not the case if you’re stuck with an exclusive CMS. Until your agency adds that function, you’re stuck.

You’re Trapped

In a bunch of ways. You’re trapped with your original agency. It’s probably why they gave you the exclusive content management system in the first place, because it forces long term repeat business. But you’re also trapped when you want to fire Ted, your own web guy, because he’s been stealing from petty cash. Who else out there is going to be familiar with your content management system? Nobody.

Pity you didn’t have a widely acknowledged content management system. Then you’d have a pool of great talent to draw from, talent that would be able to get to work on your needs immediately.

Avoid Them Like The Plague

Unless you have *very* specialized needs (and most likely even if you do), there’s no need for you to use an agency’s own content management system. If they’re offering you one then they’re doing so for the wrong reasons, they’re doing so because it’s good for *them* when they should be thinking about the best service for *you*.

Any web designer you hire should be offering you a widely available content management system option, whether it’s open source or commercial. Ask them about the different options. A good designer should be comfortable working with a couple of different systems at least, so they can offer a solution that’s best suited to your needs.

If a designer still insists that their own in-house content management system is the best option, they’re lying. Don’t ask them to justify it, because they can’t.