You Really Don’t Want a Content Management System

You really don’t. You think you do because you’re excited about the potential for your new website. You’re raring to go and you imagine yourself becoming some sort of content management ninja, swapping out images, changing body copy, making weekly updates to your sidebars, keeping everything fresh. Trust me, by the time you’re done with the development of your new site you’ll just want it to run on auto-pilot and this Platonic ideal of how a website should work will be revealed for the illusion that it is.

How do I know? Because I’ve been building sites for a long time and for all that time I’ve had clients that have wanted to have budget-busting content management systems so that they could ‘manage everything’. In my early days I gave it to them, I gave them just want they wanted, and the backend admin always became the abandoned backwater of the site. (I know this because there are sign-in logs; I can see you haven’t signed in for 18 months).

Why does this happen? Because content management is complicated. Not complicated for people like me–computer people, web developers, people who make it their business to be good with websites–but for people like you, people who don’t want to be a ‘computer person’, people who have better things to do, like run their business or spend time with their family. I understand, software can be daunting and complicated and I’m not saying you’re stupid, far from it, you’re great at the stuff you’re great at but I know, I just know, that after the thrill of a new website wears off you won’t want to bother with making content updates.

What happens then? You call me. You say ‘Ryan, can you add this second phone number to the contact us page’ or you say ‘Ryan, so-and-so no longer works here, take him off the management team page’ and I say ‘no problem’ and I make the changes. I’ll do this work for you even though I built you a content management system to update the contact us page and the management team page. I’ll do it because I understand that you don’t want to go poking around for usernames and passwords and clicking edit buttons and updating WYSIWYG textareas, you just want it changed.

And I’m happy to do it, I get to charge for those 15 minutes and you’re happy because you don’t need to give it a second thought. But consider this, when I first created your site you said you wanted a content management system, and I put a price to that–a price that, incidentally, is higher than the cost of making a mostly static website–and we agreed to a budget and the work got done. But now you’re paying me to make changes, so you’re paying twice. This time let’s just acknowledge that you don’t really want to content manage everything, that your mailing address doesn’t change often enough to require that the page be content managed, and that if something needs to change, you can drop me a line or an email and I’ll get to it this afternoon?

Now, I hear you, there are some things that make sense to content manage. Things that are highly structured and repetitive, like news or events or PDF newsletters; things that you might want to change every week and calling me would get tiresome (and expensive in the long run). Ok, so let’s manage those, but all the same, consider if your site really needs these features. I had a client that only wanted to content managed their news, and I programmed a tool to do that, and last October I stopped by the site and saw a ‘Happy Halloween’ message and I thought: ‘Great, they are using the news’. Then I noticed that the dateline was from 2008. Some people think not having news on your sites is bad– you know what’s worse?–having news that’s two years old. If you’re going to content manage, even a little bit, you’ve got to do it.

I sense that you’re still hesitant. Let me propose a little experiment. Let me develop your site the way I think it should be, with an appropriate amount of content management, and we’ll let it run for, say, three to six months. After the trial period is over we can re-evaluate and decide if you really need a content management system. If you’re calling me morning, noon, and night then we know for sure that you would benefit from some more content management. However, if, as I suspect, you find that you don’t need to call me all that often, we can both agree that site is great the way it is and you can keep the money that you would have otherwise paid me to implement content management. It’s win-win (in the sense that you keep your money and I get to be proven right).

Now, this sounds like I’m trying to get out of doing work–that maybe I don’t understand the power of content management tools or that I can’t program one–that’s not the case. What I want is for you to have a website that’s sized right for you. My goal is always to create the simplest thing that will get the job done and implementing fully featured content management systems necessarily introduces a significant level of complexity to a website. And that’s fine if it’s truly necessary, but it so seldom is. Why introduce complexity and higher costs when you don’t need too? Better to have a straightforward site and my phone number near by (or another developer’s phone number, because simple sites are simple for anyone to update) then to pay for a Ferrari when you only need a family sedan.

So, please, let’s put aside this idea of the all dominating content management system and works towards something more reasonable. I know it’s not as sexy or exciting but I also know that no matter how optimistic you are right now you’re still going to be calling me in six months to remove Helen from the accounting page.