Thursday, November 1, 2007  

Before starting EditMe, I built several simple Content Management Systems (CMS) to manage my own sites and those of friends and family. Each allowed content updates from the browser using a traditional Administration section that required a login. I chose to build these because it was fun, but also because the available commercial and open source options were so complicated. Each made assumptions about the site's structure and about how it would be managed. Each got bogged down with trying to support the most complex scenarios possible while sacrificing simplicity for the most common ones. 

Working as an Internet consultant and developer, I found that just about every small web consulting shop has their own home-grown CMS. They do this because it's quicker to customize your own code than it is to build plug-ins and modules for the open source systems, and bending them to a client's whim can be more trouble than its worth. Of course, recommending a commercial CMS to a client can double the cost of a project. 

Putting aside large corporations with highly complex needs, most people just want the simplest thing that will work. Enter the wiki - a technology fittingly described by its inventor as "the simplest thing that could possibly work." The wiki concept was born to be a collaborative tool, and it excels at that goal. But as millions of non-geeks find themselves editing wiki sites, the idea of paying somebody to change content on their site or using a complicated CMS to update it themselves starts to seem ludicrous.

Updating your company web site or intranet should be as easy as editing a wiki page. And when I talk about wiki ease of use, I mean EditMe. Anyone who has used traditional text-based wikis has to admit needing to study and learn the markup language before they could call it "easy". It should be as easy as using a word processor.

One of the aspects of EditMe that differentiates it from other wikis is its slightly less wiki design. EditMe sites can easily be configured to look like a non-wiki site. And many EditMe customers already use it for this purpose. For example, www.editme.com functions as our primary web site and is editable by nobody but us. And yet, we get all the benefits of EditMe ease of use in maintaining it.

Non-wiki sites have individual needs. This is why so many one-size-fits-all CMS products become so complicated. As they try to meet every individual need, they lose their original vision of making the site easy to change. The other side of that extreme is the web development firms that charge exorbitant fees to change it for you. EditMe fits into the space between those two extremes. With a low hosting fee and no setup you get a site you can manage yourself. If you want to integrate a custom design or perhaps need a feature that doesn't exist, give us a call and we can provide a custom development quote. No other wiki host offers that kind of flexibility and room for growth. And no other wiki host is thinking outside the wiki box.

As EditMe's custom development offering starts to ramp up over the next couple of months, I ask you to think again about how you maintain your non-wiki web sites. Shouldn't it be as easy as editing your EditMe site? It should.

And for the web developers and freelancers who may be reading, ask yourself this: would your customer prefer to use EditMe to maintain their site? All of the tools we use to perform custom development work will soon be available to you. This gives you the "home-grown CMS" advantage without having to build, maintain and host it yourself. Next month we will be announcing a new affiliate program that will pay a healthy commission to developers and freelancers who refer new hosting customers. If you might be interested in participating in such a program, drop me a note - I'd love to get your feedback.

Cheers,
Matt