Monday, September 8, 2008
Many of the most successful EditMe sites are used for business purposes, and for good reason. During my many years at a mid-sized interactive marketing agency, I learned a lot about what businesses need on the web, and have built EditMe with these lessons in mind. In this post, I will share some of these lessons, explain how EditMe responds to them, and prompt you to ask yourself some questions about how your business gets what it needs done on the web today.
Working with marketing folks at companies in a wide array of industries taught me one thing above all else: they need no-nonsense content management. Content management is perhaps the most needlessly bloated and over-priced software product companies are buying today. Commercial licenses can easily cost five figures. Open source options of mixed quality come and go on the whim of their developers.
Whether you pay a hefty license fee or not, anyone who has built a site upon a content management system has realized the amount of effort involved. Applying the design and building out the site the can easily be ten to fifteen times the cost of the license. Much of this effort is wasted working around the needless complexity built into the system. Every time a feature is added, some slice of its users will like it, and the rest will need to work around it. This monolithic product development pattern is broken.
I remember the first time I edited a wiki, I was totally taken aback. It was so ridiculously simple and yet so powerful. It was clear to me at that moment that traditional web content management and the wiki concept needed to merge. Every bloated content management system has a wiki at its core. Strip away the multi-level moderated access controls, the needlesly complex workflows and the awkward attempt at a navigational structure and you're left with a simple tool that edits web pages.
Many companies struggle with IT to manage a dedicated server for their intranet or that client portal used to post project documents. You have to struggle to get budget for hardware, find personell to make sure its up and running, and purchase or build software to manage the web site. The case for SAAS (software as a service) has been made, but many companies still shy away from it for reasons I will address in the next section. In any case, wouldn't that time and money be better spent growing your business?
Those companies who don't host in-house usually pay an agency to provide end-to-end management, including hosting, development, project management and consulting. Agencies can provide tremendous value, especially when it comes to strategy consulting, brand development and design. But are you paying exorbitant consultant fees for simple web development? When is the last time you took your agency's recommendations (which you have paid for) and shopped them around for implementation? EditMe has a proven base to build upon (meaning much of the work is already done) and we charge less than half of what most agencies do per hour.
Perhaps you have gotten frustrated with your in-house or agency solution and gone SAAS. You've found a service on the web that promises low monthly or annual fees and impressively snazzy web tools to manage your site. The options in this space are so plentiful you can get lost for months in evaluation. Some are even free! But ask yourself one important question before selecting a hosted content management tool: What if I need a feature that isn't offered?
Is ABC Hosting going to build it for you just because you asked for it? Is Google? Let's be honest... they won't. SAAS providers will add features to their software when and only when it provides enough value to enough of their customers to justify the expense. In other words, unless there are lots and lots of customers clammoring for that must-have capability you find yourself needing to get the job done, you're stuck. And your options at this point are few. You've invested heavily in this platform, and moving your entire site (or sites) would be a huge distraction. In the end, you will probably settle for less than what you need.
With our rich API and affordable professional services, EditMe has made sure that this will never happen to our customers. Yes, you may have to pay for that feature to be developed for your site, but the cost is probably less than you think and, more importantly, it can be done. Better yet, you don't even have to pay us to develop that feature. Feel free to shop it around... our API is well documented and accessible to any developer who cares to use it.
In summary, EditMe is a wiki hosting service with big aspirations. Yes, we've created an awesome wiki product. But we're looking beyond that, to those in business who can see the promise of this technology consuming the old and bloated set of content management tools, the over-priced agencies charging hundreds of dollars per hour for simple web form development, and the wheel-spinning in-house solutions to today's business website needs.
