Better than open source content management systems

It is a long standing argument between providers of commercial content management systems (CMS) and open source CMS whether one is better than the other.

Without completely pre-empting this blog post the simple answer is they both have their place in different scenarios. However there is a growing movement in our opinion, and certainly what we are seeing 'on the ground', is that (in particular) the higher level of support we can offer is significantly outweighing the merits of the open source approach.

The fact that we charge a monthly fee for using the platform (which is really the key differential to open source platforms) enables us to spend significant time on supporting your website when you need it.

When you have a freelance consultant build your CMS, once he has finished (and is likely not earning any ongoing support fees) of course he has to go and find other work, and depending on the nature of the subsequent work may well not be immediately available to answer your future questions or problems.

Even if you do pay him a support fee, given your website is completely separate from, and perhaps developed in a completely different way to other websites using the same open source platform, it is much more difficult to support the system on a small monthly fee compared to a commercial platform that uses a more consistent approach to all client systems all hosted in the same single instance of the system.

Furthermore, if this consultant wasn't available to do further work to your site you would then have to find another consultant to continue the work - but all these consultants would code the sites in different ways and no developers like to work with other developers code.

Further still, none of these consultants could possibly know the open source platform quite as well as the developers who have built the (Webi CMS) commercial CMS from scratch and therefore have an intimate knowledge of what their system can do and can much more readily modify it in whatever way we choose.

If you would like to find out more about Webi CMS you can read about CMS for business websites, why Webi CMS is a simple CMS or if you are a web designer you can read 10 reasons why a design agency should work with Webi CMS.