CMS Trap
hakunin.com
CMS Trap
1–10 of 65 posts
Re: CMS Trap
#2Love of complexity is a programming disease.
Re: CMS Trap
#3Wow. This should be a must-read for developers, especially ones working in the content field.
I've made a few complex apps that use Google Spreadsheets as the backend...that is, to hold the public facing data and not, obviously, any proprietary data. This makes it very easy for those who have to maintain the app to enter in data. The downside is, of course, the inability to strongly enforce business rules and to denormalize things...but that forces me to reduce the data design to a bare minimum, which is often the best strategy in the first place.
I hope I never have to be in a situation where I'm building a CMS-type system for a client. People who haven't dealt with data-modeling or relational-databases don't appreciate simplicity...in the end, most people want something that they can type a headline, some text, and attach a photo or two (i.e. a Tumblr). But if you give them reins to design the system, they will inevitably want you to build them something Drupal like. In my experience, I've found that all these different content-relations end up being unused, and the client ends up hacking around them just to get a simple post up.
Re: CMS Trap
#4Just because you use a CMS doesn't mean you have to use it for everything. If you're managing content (blog content?) use a CMS. If you're making PPC pages, host them statically somewhere. If you sell something, use ecommerce software for that part.
The right tool for the right job.
Re: CMS Trap
#5@rudyrigot and the team @prismicio http://prismic.io really have a handle on this problem.
They believe a github-esq content management system makes the most sense for content creators, and a content API makes most sense for engineers to distribute that content inside of a variety of platforms (mobile, a rails app, whatever). Saw Rudy speak at Zendesk/Rails meetup this month, it was a very good presentation (I am not affiliated with Prismic).
I've been playing with their ruby-kit, so far so good, really liking this approach and plan to see awesome things ahead.
Re: CMS Trap
#6I think the key question is: At what point is building a user interface more expensive than hiring a full time developer?
Re: CMS Trap
#7Just because you use a CMS doesn't mean you have to use it for everything. If you're managing content (blog content?) use a CMS. If you're making PPC pages, host them statically somewhere. If you sell something, use ecommerce software for that part. The right tool for the right job.
If you're making PPC pages, host them statically somewhere.
I'd counter recommend this. In my limited experience with it, dynamic PPC landing pages are so effective as to be almost cheating.
BCC's AdWords campaigns are not doing well in 2013 for what I believe are unrelated (and mysterious) reasons, but the ~20 lines of Rails code which make URL #1 and URL #2 roughly the same today but will automatically switch URL #1 to a different creative in a few days have been worth, guesstimating a number here, somewhere north of $20,000. (Bingo cards are a very seasonal market. For the last couple of weeks, most teachers have been in the market for Thanksgiving bingo cards. This will not be true in a few days. The #1 URL, which I use for many of my campaigns, uses some really dead simple heuristics to guess which creative to show people. The heuristic was worth > 10% lift in conversions versus alternatives like "Pick our most popular activity ever", "Pick an activity at random", and "Pick Patrick's guess at what would convert best."
http://www.bingocardcreator.com/lp/try_online
http://www.bingocardcreator.com/lpc/thanksgiving <-- There are actually about ~900 landing pages like this, which is a trick that few people manage if they do them in static HTML.
Re: CMS Trap
#8Back in the old days (2005) we used to call this Do the Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work.
Re: CMS Trap
#9Just because you use a CMS doesn't mean you have to use it for everything. If you're managing content (blog content?) use a CMS. If you're making PPC pages, host them statically somewhere. If you sell something, use ecommerce software for that part. The right tool for the right job.
> If you're managing content (blog content?) use a CMS.
Jekyll would disagree.
Re: CMS Trap
#10Just because you use a CMS doesn't mean you have to use it for everything. If you're managing content (blog content?) use a CMS. If you're making PPC pages, host them statically somewhere. If you sell something, use ecommerce software for that part. The right tool for the right job.
> If you're managing content (blog content?) use a CMS. Jekyll would disagree.
Jekyll is a CMS.