Choosing the right CMS

Ewan Lyle is Hampton's Digital Team Lead with over 20 years of experience in web development.

There are lots of reasons why businesses come to us for a new website, but the root cause of their problem tends to come back to the same four things—content, design, code and cost.

We have a few tools that can help, but our favourite is Craft CMS.

What is Craft CMS?

Craft is a content management system (CMS). Content management systems allow you to store, structure and govern the content that lives on your website.

We believe good design needs to be effective design, so it's important that our tools not only support bespoke creative, but deliver the best possible user experience.

It’s common for our clients to have tried free website solutions like WordPress or site-builders like Wix — but they are usually looking to progress onto something more bespoke which can handle content at scale or integrations with a third party. That’s where Craft comes into its own.

Content

Does this sound like you?

• You’re overwhelmed by too much content and too many plugins.
• You have no control over who posts what or when.
• There’s also content you can’t control; like your metadata for SEO, or which links appear in the main navigation.
• Your site can’t handle multiple languages.
• You can’t delete or archive content safely.

Craft’s content benefits:

• It has a clean, customisable dashboard for a quick overview of recent changes. You can also update content on-the-go; it’s mobile-friendly.
• You can assign your team different access privileges, manage your publishing workflow with drafts and scheduled posts.
• You can get fine-grain control of things like SEO and navigation with optional plugins.
• It can support multiple languages when you need it.
• It has “soft deletions”, which act like a trash bin so you can get content back if you accidentally delete it.

Design

Does this sound like you?

• Maybe you’re worried that everything looks the same, or that it’s a messy free-for-all with no consistency at all.
• Perhaps you’re limited by fixed templates or a generic user interface design.
• You can’t add or control images or video.
• You struggle to predict what the outcome will look like and can’t preview before you publish.

Craft’s design benefits:

• Whether you prefer a fixed template to maintain consistency, or want reorderable content blocks for more flexibility, Craft can do both!
• You can do simple image edits on the fly, like crop, rotate and set the focal point of your image. You can also upload MP4 files or embed video from YouTube or Vimeo.
• Live Preview reduces guesswork by showing exactly what your page looks like as you’re populating it.

Code

Does this sound like you?

• Your site is old or buggy, making it difficult and expensive to maintain. It’s impacting your ability to make changes when you need to.
• It’s built with an old or unusual CMS and you can’t find a developer experienced with it.
• It has limited features, or it is really bloated with loads of things you never use. Either way, it slows you down!

Craft’s code benefits:

• Any old or out-of-date system is going to develop some issues. Craft are on it at their end; frequently releasing new features and optimising what’s already there. We offer monthly maintenance packages to help you keep everything up to date.
• Craft CMS is well documented and has a well-established community. If you later decide to take your site in-house or elsewhere, there are lots experienced Craft developers out there (or they can learn the ropes through Craft’s learning and support resources).
• Craft is powerful out of the box but also very extendable. It can support ecommerce, third party integrations and a range of plugins. User permissions can be set to only show plugins to admin users.

Cost

The final thing to mention is cost.

There’s an obvious appeal to free or low-cost website providers. But there can be a false economy with free solutions. A major issue is security — the big names become big targets, vulnerable to hacking and hijacking — which puts your business and reputation at risk.

With Craft CMS, you can spend less time firefighting issues and free yourself up for delivering on more meaningful objectives.

While we have plenty of experience with other systems, we find Craft CMS fits the bill for the majority of our B2B and B2C clients because it is so flexible and extendable. However, every project is different, and we can always explore different options to make sure you get what works for you!

Any new-to-you CMS will come with a learning curve, for content authors and developers alike — so we include CMS training in every project to make the transition a little easier.

If you’ve been struggling with a site builder like Wix or overwhelmed by Wordpress, it might be time to upgrade to a bespoke Craft build.