Building Business Systems for Fun & Profit

I'm declaring war on the web design industry!

Now they may not even notice my jihad against them, but let me explain why anyway:

The SME website market is at the beginning of a major transition:

• away from static "brochure-style" websites, designed with editing tools such as Microsoft FrontPage (at the low end) and Adobe DreamWeaver (almost the industry standard).
• towards websites running on a software platform (called a Content Management System or CMS).

Now I'm all in favour of the change - in fact the only type of web hosting that I.T. on Tap offers is using a CMS; we believe very strongly it's the way to go.

CMS software makes it very easy for you to update your website using an ordinary web browser, and it also makes it cheap & easy to add advanced software features to your website. That last point is key: putting a basic brochure up as your website doesn't cut it in 2008. Your business will benefit much more if you actually leverage the power of the web to a much greater extent, and a CMS is the starting point for doing just that.

So back to the industry's web designers - if they're supporting, even driving, the shift to CMS software then where's the problem?

The issue I have with what they're doing is this: it seems like nearly every web design house is announcing the release of their own, proprietary, CMS software. There are literally thousands of these products on offer. Of course the quality varies enormously between software products, and many are simple derivatives of other products, for the most part they all have one aim:

To lock you, the customer, into using that same company for your design work - forever!

Since there is only company skilled up in using that CMS software, guess how many options you have to shop around your design work? That's right: none at all, unless you're willing to write off your previous investment and switch to another software product.

Is this huge diversity of software products actually contributing anything to the industry? I can't see it; to me it just looks like a cynical "land grab" to get as many clients locked into each company's proprietary software products as possible, before the dust settles and the market starts to realise what's happened. Very few of these software products actually contribute any advancement or innovation to the market. We simply don't need thousands of CMS software products, and in time I'm sure the bulk of them will wash away, taking your website investment with them.

What's the lesson to take away? Simply this: when you're talking CMS software with a prospective web designer, ask the tough questions:

• Who wrote it? (Best answer: an open source community. 2nd best answer: a credible 3rd party software vendor.)
• Who's supporting it? (Best answer: as above. )
• How many websites are currently running on this software? (Minimum answer: 10,000+)
• Who else (other than you, Mr Designer) is skilled up in designing for this software product? (Minimum answer: 1,000+ web designers around the world)

If you don't get good answers to the above questions, then either insist your designer use one of the top dozen or so software products (rated by number of websites and/or number of designers). Or find a designer who has your best interests more at heart.