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sinious
sinious
Legend
November 9, 2015
Question

What's your favorite WordPress "all in one" box solution for small clients?

  • November 9, 2015
  • 1 reply
  • 788 views

I'm curious what you all suggest for your small to even perhaps mid size clients for a small site they wish to manage.

I'm always leery about handing the keys of developing a page over to a client. Even when I do my best to make a strong structured template, restrict settings and styles and have a nice long sit-down on the do's and don'ts. Then I hand over the site and some do just fine, only changing a word or two. Others try to shoehorn in images and/or have giant red blinking marquee text across the front page within 24 hours.

I don't expect to win them all but I really do keep WP fairly vanilla. Based on the client, TinyMCE seems to appeal to them if I tweak out the various default styles. If they're a bit more skilled I'll toss on some Bootstrap short codes. After this is where people start getting a little scary.

I've been dealing with a system that a client had built using Visual Composer, and has even tacked on things like Ultimate Addons. Sure enough they wanted to add in some trivial functionality (tab lists that just animate in content slightly different than the "stock" tab switcher does) and they can't do it. So they hire someone to do it how they want it and I'm looking at almost 1300 lines of hand written code from the guy just to stay within the VC/UA world of compliance, but now that the updates of WP march on, VC/UA are starting to get all sorts of bugged and the mess is getting out of control.

At this point I really want to go back to the old old school methods. Hire a web firm, let them handle it, please keep your hands off and definitely don't paint yourself in a corner with a system that's just breaking more and more as time goes on.

Anyone found a setup like that? Doesn't need to be WordPress, just anything that isn't fully custom (which is the only system I like)? Something that may not feel like a blogging system being used as just a CMS, makes it friendly to create menus, attach pages, SEO, insert an image without it being accidentally a 5000PX 35MB image on the front page? What do you like?

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1 reply

Rob Hecker2
Rob Hecker2
Legend
November 10, 2015

just anything that isn't fully custom

I didn't respond to this yesterday because my CMS is fully custom, but since no one else has responded yet, I will throw in my two cents.

I offer a simple, basic CMS package that is inexpensive. It isn't as slick as a WordPress site, but it is identical to my more expensive CMS packages, just with the more expensive features turned off.

One of my clients needed a web presence in China, so they purchased the cheap CMS package. Six months later, the business in China was doing well, so the client upgraded the CMS. It took me all of five minutes to activate the more expensive features.

So if you set up the client on a WordPress site. Later, if/when they outgrow it and you want to move them to a custom CMS, the migration becomes a huge chore.

sinious
siniousAuthor
Legend
November 11, 2015

I 100% agree, but haven't found a 'box' to put our clients in just yet. The corporate branding regulations are so vast and wide I find no CMS handles it all.

I can break a CMS product down to modules and attempt to use that approach to rapidly assemble a solution.

Then reality checks in and my CMS never handles the entirely random needs of the sites.

Are you boxing clients into "what the system supports" and charging for customization as we do or is your system really supporting all of their needs?

    Rob Hecker2
    Rob Hecker2
    Legend
    November 11, 2015

    Are you boxing clients into "what the system supports" and charging for customization as we do or is your system really supporting all of their needs?

    My system services retreat centers and yoga studio type businesses, so it services two business models that have similarities. The yoga studio clients have small budgets and don't ask for customization, but the retreat centers do ask for (and pay for) a lot of customization. Since all clients use the same code base, a feature purchased by one client may become freely available to all the rest.

    The system is pretty complex. It's not just a CMS but a whole business management system, with over 50 reports clients can run--mostly financial and inventory. There are add-on features clients pay extra for, like international services, merchandise POS system, and a blog.

    Years ago, when I built my second custom CMS, I realized that the two CMS's were similar, but not perfectly matched. For instance, in one database a table might be called students whereas in the other database the corresponding table was called customers. I decided to build and refine a single CMS instead of maintaining multiple CMS's.

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