How to Choose the Right CMS for Your Website

Matt: [00:00:00] People often ask, what is the best CMS? But actually, that's the wrong question. The better question is, what questions should you ask before choosing a CMS? Because if you ask the right questions, the right CMS oftentimes will choose itself. So today, we're gonna be walking through the framework that we use before recommending something like a WordPress or Webflow, Shopify, a headless CMS, or maybe no CMS at all, or even a different CMS, 'cause there's lots of CMSs out there.

So if this sounds interesting to you and you wanna support the show, you can go and check us out on that Patreon, leave a review or rating on your podcast app, join us in our Discord server, or share this with your friends. And if you wanna learn how to code and do some courses, we have some courses on the front end, the back end, of web development, of other topics as well, go and check out Scrimba.

And they have a Scrimba Pro plan that you can get up to 20% off with if you click on our link. Full details will be in the show notes on htmlallthethings.com and in the show description, and of course, [00:01:00] the link will be in the show description and in the show notes. Again, full details on how it works in the show notes on htmlallthethings.com. So I wanna just kick off this episode really quick by saying that there is no best CMS. I think that

people will oftentimes write, and I, I mean, I've probably done it and pr- might even do it, on social media, where you're just trying to make a post really concise, and you're like, "This is the best CMS," or this is, you know, whatever. But in reality, when you really kind of look at all the different options out there, CMS is a compromise, every project has different requirements, and you probably should not become loyal to one platform. What you really should be doing is becoming loyal to solving problems. You should take a look at the problem in front of you.

Let's say it's your website. You look at it and you go, "I'm just gonna use WordPress 'cause WordPress is the best." Well, is it the best for your specific use case? Are you trying to do inventory of a store? If you are trying to do inventory of a store, maybe that's not the best. Things like... something like that. Uh, Mike, I will say your mic is messing up [00:02:00] right now.

Mikhail: Oh yeah. That's because I haven't said anything in a while. I think as soon as I say something, it should come back down to normal

Matt: Nope. You sound like you're coming in from a ham radio from 1947.

Mikhail: Really?

Matt: Yes, sir

Mikhail: All right. Um

Great

Matt: I can hear myself echoing and you sound like you're coming in the front lines

Mikhail: Let me try to open up Wavelength. That sometimes solves it

That did not work at all

Matt: It, it almost sounds like it's not

Mikhail: I feel

Matt: the right mic

Mikhail: It is though, because I can see, uh, like I can see the activity and I'm pointing at the right mic right now,

so, and I can, and

Matt: you're peaking the whole time?

Mikhail: Yeah, but I'm usually... Yeah, maybe. Maybe that's a little bit too much peaking. Uh, let's see. Let me turn off voice focus.

Matt: Whoa!

Mikhail: Turn it back on. Testing, testing. Still the same. S- Does it sound the same?[00:03:00]

What the heck is this?

Matt: better

Mikhail: Is that better?

Testing, Testing, one, two, three. I mean, I'm not seeing it peak as much anymore.

Matt: as

Mikhail: Quiet, quieter, but, like, still really bad.

Matt: No,

Mikhail: Is that what you're...

Matt: I think. I think

Mikhail: Okay. Yeah, I don't know. Someti- sometimes it just breaks. Like, I don't really understand why it would break or what it would cause to break.

Probably, I don't know. W- what is even vibe code? Like, why would the microphone all of a sudden break? That doesn't make any sense. Like, it's on the same exact

Matt: I've been, I've had many a problem myself with Logitech Capture and fucking

Mikhail: Yeah.

Matt: things. It's horrible. It's a horrible

Mikhail: Yep. Okay, well, hopefully we can continue on now that it's somewhat resolved

Matt: Right. Okay, so I'll just do like a running in 'cause I'll cut all that stuff obviously

Mikhail: Mm-hmm.

Matt: So a big thing that you're gonna wanna do is you're gonna want to become loyal to actually solving problems. You're gonna want to [00:04:00] analyze the project that's in front of you. Let's say it's for yourself. You... Your favorite, your favorite CMS is WordPress. That weight, absolutely, but there's many other questions there.

If you're specifically trying to make a website that can be very quickly edited, that, uh, is, is for, like, the inventory of a store or something, you might wanna look at other options, because maybe there's a CMS out there for you that's gonna be able to very quickly populate a very massive chart of all the data of all the products and SKUs and things that you have. Maybe WordPress is the way to do that. Maybe WordPress is the way to do that with a plugin that costs too much. You really should be asking yourself lots of questions, analyzing the situation, and I mean, easier said than done, avoiding bogged down in those questions So

Mikhail: Weirdly, I'm still seeing... Sorry.

Matt: Oh, yeah, yeah, you're

Mikhail: It-

Matt: and all kinds of stuff

Mikhail: Fantastic. Um, like that's gonna be worse

Matt: It sounds like someone is vacuuming in the [00:05:00] background

Mikhail: Like that's crazy. Why-- There's, there is no one vacuuming here. Let me reset my microphone. Give me a sec

Okay. Testing, testing one, two, three

Matt: It's back to where it was. Uh, it's not echoing, so that's good

Mikhail: Say something and say some more things

Matt: Check one, two. Checkity check, check, check

Mikhail: Yeah, it's no longer echoing. Okay, that's good. 'Cause I was seeing your voice come in as you were talking, and I like even moving away from it, I was somehow... And, and turning you down to like zero, I was somehow seeing it

Matt: Yeah, it's like a feedback loop somehow

Mikhail: Yeah. Cow. Okay. Anyway. Fuck. Sorry

Matt: Uh, well, no, it's not your fault. Um, do you want to come in or do you want me to just start the questions part?

Mikhail: That's a good q- that's a good point. Uh, what was the... Let, let, let me come in. Um, this was right before the questions?

Matt: yeah, there's no best CMS, and I described, like, you should be going through the requirements and, and, like, analyzing your own projects and, you know, whatever

Mikhail: Okay, I'll come in

[00:06:00] I, I think there's some truth or, like, most truth to, like, the no best CMS thought. It-- But it's kind of frustrating that there is no best CMS. It's frustrating and it's good. So, like, I love competition. Obviously, I'm constantly trying new technologies. It's been so long, though, that you'd think that someone would've perfected a CMS that just is able to do everything, and it doesn't have much compromise.

But it's still very much the case. And I feel like in the era of AI, this-- I, I'm, I've, I'm struggling to figure out where the next step is for CMSs. Is it, like, fully automated CMSs that you're able to then edit yourself? Like, you know, y-make sure that you can... It's essentially a, like a review CMS. So the CMS will generate its own content, uh, and you just review it and are able to edit it.

Is it a custom CMS for every project? So, like, every project has, you know, like, like you said, certain requirements, and the CMS will be [00:07:00] de-generated based on those requirements for everything. Like, I, I'm curious to see where the future of the CMS is because right now it's kind of a cluster, and I get-- I think we'll get into that, like, especially when we start talking about the competitors, like, out there.

There's just so many different types of CMSs and different-- and then competitors within those types. Like, I just don't see them all surviving, and they... I don't know. We'll, we'll see. But it, it's definitely a good discussion to have right now because s-people still need CMSs. Like, they're not going anywhere, and they're super key for being able to manage a large website.

When you have split teams, especially, like, if you have an engineering team and a marketing team, you don't want the engineering team to go be the only ones making updates. That's a nightmare. Trust me, don't do that. Um, even in the age of AI, or especially in the age of AI, it's, it would be a nightmare. So yeah, I think there's a lot to be said on which one to use for which, for which, uh, use case.

And the last thing I'll say is that, like, no matter which you choose, w-you will always have people complaining about it. [00:08:00] It's just the era of CMSs

Matt: you're getting usually, like, hundreds if not thousands of features with a lot of these CMS, including free ones. Like WordPress is a prime example of that, where especially if you're self-hosting it, you can grab WordPress and just use it for free on your own local machine if you're trying to just play with it or you wanna learn it, that's a free CMS, and there's already a ton of features there, and then you can expand it with a bunch of free plugins, free themes. There's a ton of things. You can also code some stuff up yourself as well. Like there's... And so because things, because these CMS are very... I mean, they're very populated. Like, they're very, they, they're, it, it's a general technology, right? They're trying to appeal to a mass amount of people. Obviously, there's gonna be some specialty CMSs or ones that we talk about which, that, like, fit into certain use cases better. But I mean, even let's say you, you decide, "I'm gonna go headless for, you know, project A," project A could probably still be done in WordPress. So because they're trying to make the technology so general, naturally speaking, you're gonna have a [00:09:00] lot of things that you won't use. You might use 100 features of features, for example. So what I, what I broke this down into is I broke this episode down into several questions, specifically seven questions, these are the questions that I will ask my clients. Now, I don't go to them and rapid-fire go, "Okay, question one," you know? I don't do that. That's kinda what we're gonna do for this episode, but this, these questions and these answers naturally kinda come out through my own conversations with them because I've been doing this for a long time to try to determine what their needs are. And I would like to say as well, Michael, you're saying, you know, competition's great and you wish there was one good CMS for everything. More or less, we use WordPress and Webflow for, like, a lot of our, a lot of our cases because familiarity and things which will come in, and things do play a role, right?

And

Mikhail: Yeah.

Matt: and things like that. So

let's,

Mikhail: it's a necessity. It's [00:10:00] a necessity. You can't be using 15 different CMSs as a, as a business. Like we're, we're a team of two. Even, even if we had a team of 30, like how would we manage thir- 30 different CMSs, right? Like it's just, it's just not possible. So you, you, you kind of choose maybe two, and that's-- even that is, I feel like, a lot.

Um, and you try to fit them into, you know, the use cases that they fit into. So like I... Yeah. It's, it's, it's a difficult one. If we used one for each one, then just be chaos

Matt: Well, and we have other clients on older ones. We have other clients on more niche CMS that we still help here and there with content and website updates that are just sort of random, random CMSs that never come up in the, like, top 10 lists or, or never really talked about in the zeitgeist because we made those sites years and years and years ago, and they're basic websites that don't really need an upgrade for the most part. So, so let's jump into these questions here. Let's jump into these questions. And again, you, you don't, you don't rapid fire these off to your [00:11:00] clients, and some of them are gonna be ones that you ask yourself or, you know, things that you kind of fish for the answer for through other means. Question one, who will update the website? So just as a, as a simple like kind of thought project there, you think, okay, a CMS that's easy for developers, as an example, is not gonna necessarily be easy for clients. You don't want to have a CMS that is enter the title, okay, great, that's a text box, and then now go into a rich text field and do everything through custom code, through custom widgets, through whatever, 'cause clients are gonna get confused.

And so if, if it's a developer, the developer may love that. "Hey, I already have all my f- my tables done in HTML. I can just go into that rich text field, press embed code, it embeds a little bit of that HTML, maybe a little bit of that CSS to handle the responsivity, and boom, I have it done." But someone who is not a developer is not gonna want to learn to do that. not gonna know how to do it, and even if they reach for AI to do it, now they're using another software to get it done. So what you really wanna think about is, okay, what is this person [00:12:00] editing why, and how can I make this experience easier for them? So some common answers to this question, let's say it's a client relationship in this case.

So I ask a client, you know, "Who's gonna be updating the website?" Might be the business owner themselves, could be the marketing team. So the marketing team right there, you're immediately thinking, okay, the marketing team might need more metrics. The marketing team might also really like having insights randomly. So, uh, we used a, uh, plugin years and years ago for the marketing team on a couple of our WordPress websites where the marketing team literally just wanted to log in and see a quick stat. How many people clicked this? Not super in-depth, no bounce rate, no nothing, just when they're doing their sort of day-to-day, "Hey, I want that little bit of insight."

And they don't wanna jump to Google Analytics or to an analytics platform to then filter it down to that specific page and then mess around with that specific page. They don't wanna do that. so that's something that, you know, you want, you wanna consider. Does the CMS have little quick stats like that, or does it have support for a plugin that'll handle that? [00:13:00] Developer is another, another answer, and that's one that we already discussed, where they're gonna be more comfortable with messing around with scripts or m- adding HTML or not necessarily having... Let's just say you have a very structured blog post. Maybe they wanna just more or less do that with custom code, and so all they need is literally a title and then a rich text field, and then you have a rich text field.

And they put in all their code for the structure in the rich text field, that's all you get, and that's, you know, good enough and, and that'll work. But that's not gonna work for that marketing team. It's probably not gonna work for that business owner. Volunteers is another one. This one's actually crucial, and 'cause we work, actually worked with lots of...

We, we, we work with charities, we work with non-for- not-profit, non-for-profits, the thing here is that if you have a volunteer, that person is not there all the time, they're not massively trained, and honestly, sometimes they're not fully invested. The, the reality here is that some of those volunteers are going to be high school kids, and here in Canada, or at least in our [00:14:00] jurisdiction, we were going through high school, we needed 40 hours of community service. The... And you needed to volunteer, get your volunteer hours, your 40 hours volunteer hours, and that might be who's filling in the stuff. And you, even if that's the case, they're kind of, you know, checked out. They're just trying to get their 40 hours. You wanna make the editing experience very easy for them.

If they have to dig in and do whatever, they're not really gonna care. They're gonna kind of, like, half-ass it, kind of throw some numbers in there, throw some information in there. So you do have to consider that and make it very easy. You don't want it to be this long, grueling process of making a blog post or making a custom post type. Try to make it as easy as possible. And then another one here that's gonna throw a major wrench into our operations is multiple people. What if it's the business owner, the marketing team, the volunteers, the developers, cetera? What if that's the case? If that is the case, okay, now we kind of can't do the developer experience like we said, 'cause there's just two fields, but we also don't wanna bog down the developer.

But at the same time, we want to respect the speed for [00:15:00] the volunteers and the business owner, who's probably

Mikhail: Absolutely.

Matt: doing other things So it's a bit of a mess. So this is, this is where your kind of your pull, push and pull kind of starts. It's kind of where the rubber hits the road. here's some common examples of something. We're gonna add some content into this to add even more nuance in. So a common example for using a CMS is restaurant, they're updating their hours. Straight up, they're updating whether they're open on Tuesdays. Are they open late on the weekends? You know, are they a bar and grill? Is the bar open late? Is food open late?

Whatever. That might be something that the business owner has to handle. You have to think about that, right? The developer's not gonna jump in there. The business owner might handle that 'cause they're deciding, yeah, you know what? It's St. Patrick's Day, I'm gonna, you know, make this-- uh, I'm gonna change the hours for this Saturday, if that's, if that's when St.

Patrick's Day is. I'm gonna quickly change the hours on a whim, or new regulations come in. New regulations come in and say, "Hey, you can't make noise past midnight in that area." Okay. If you can't make noise past midnight in that [00:16:00] area, then you're gonna have to, you're gonna have to accommodate that, and the business owner would wanna quickly log in and quickly change that.

And so you wouldn't need a big rich text field for the developer to come in and yada, yada. You want quick, easy, boom, boom, boom. What do they need? They need to change the hours. They need to put the dates in there. Okay. If they're-- And then you, you can even-- you can go a step further, and this isn't necessarily in, in the initial meeting.

This is when you start hit, getting into the weeds, so I'll just touch on it. But something like if you notice that they're constantly accommodating a second set of hours just for a week, like, oh, this week we're open till one AM every day, but normally we're only open till eleven, you could have that in your CMS or you can have a temp hours that say this, this set of hours will show up until this date, and it'll automatically just come down to save the business owner time.

'Cause again, you're making this for the business owner. Things like churches posting events, that's actually really critical. And not even just churches, like just posting events. We've gotten massive amounts of po-positive feedback, uh, which sounds ridiculous, but we've got [00:17:00] massive amounts of positive feedback from customers when we take their events from something like a newsletter that has not everybody on there, or a newsletter that is actually just sent out to like, you know, ten or fifteen people.

Again, these are small to medium businesses. And it's just PDFs. People don't get it. It goes to their spam filter. They forget to look, whatever. But people, especially people who are tech-savvy, at, at least to like a consumer they're gonna do a quick Google and be like, you know, the name of the company events.

And if they're there, it saves the company phone calls. People are showing up on time. More people are showing up. More people are buying tickets, et cetera. so this is, you know, another thing, another thing to consider there is like, okay, who's gonna be posting the events? And like in what time zone?

And all these other things, right? Local businesses adding services, very, very similar to the updating of hours. Very, very similar there, 'cause just rapid fire, you know, adding services. and I mean, that's, kind of it for this question, for me anyway. Did you have anything el- anything to add to this one, Mike?[00:18:00]

Mikhail: Yeah, I think I do. So on the, uh, like, it-- This one's really difficult because the assumptions you make early on will dictate the type of CMS you create for them. But when you create it and you pass it over, a lot of times those assumptions start to be proven wrong. So a lot of times you'll be like, "Okay, so you'll, you're gonna be able to, like, it's a WordPress site, you're gonna be able to update this.

You're gonna be able to create these events, right?" And the guy will be like, "Yeah, no problem. I can create the events no problem." And you're like, "Okay, well, I'll just create you a basic event CMS page, and you'll be able to go in and add an event as, like, a post type or something like that, and that's it."

And then you get to the point of passing it on, and they're like, "Where's the events?" And I'm like, "Well, it's in the event page post type." And they're like, "Well, what's that mean?" And then you're showing them that, where, where is that? And they're like, "Well, this is too confusing." And then you can't, you can't go back and be like, "Well, you told me you could do this."

Like, you ca- Like, that's not a, that's not a response you can have. So what ends up happening is, is that after you pass off something to a client, [00:19:00] you might have to be able to make some adjustments for their use case. And that's again, where a more sophist- not a more sophisticated, but a more seasoned CMS like WordPress can come in and help 'cause there's plugins, there's tutorials out there.

Like, there's so much around it that where if you were to create a custom CMS, um, or use a very basic headless CMS, you're kind of stuck in the, the, the case of not being able to do it without code, which will slow you down. So I think when you're choosing the solution, make sure that you're choosing something that's will fit the client post, uh, like handover, handoff.

If the, if you, if you know the client is super tech savvy and you know they've worked with WordPress a bunch or, or like whatever CMS a bunch, then you can be a little bit more confident. But if you're very hesitant to assume the client will be able to do even basic things like fill in a post type, you might have to do some other custom solution for them that will make it dead [00:20:00] simple, dead easy, right?

And that's the same thing that goes for like volunteers that Matt mentioned. In those cases, you can't assume anything. You have to make it so dead simple that they can't screw up. Every decision, every, every field that you post, every button that you put there has to be so dead simple that if they-- the only way they could screw up is, like, they just can't read English or something like that.

You know what I mean? Or, or not even that, because some people don't read. So, like, you really have to think through UX and CMSs, especially when they're accessed by people of varying degrees of, uh, skills.

Matt: You know what? Like, when you mention that, I know we've actually had an episode on, uh, CMS UX like that, where I've talked about how I want to make my client experience basically a fill-in-the-blank where I mitigate as many errors as I can. I'm gonna include that in the show notes, a link to that in the show notes if you're interested, uh, in listening to that, because, like, we went through that whole process, and I'll-- It's an older episode, so maybe even we'll cover that, you know, once again, uh, in the, in the future as well, 'cause it's a very, very good point.

Uh, and we actually got, like, quite a few comments I remember back then from people saying, like, "This [00:21:00] is something that people honestly forget." And then what ends up happening is, is the agency hands it off to the client, round one, and then it's like three, four more rounds of back and forth because they need to, like, make things simpler, add more fields, chisel things off, and it, it starts becoming this sort of, like, mess. And so one thing I kind of pride myself on, I'm not saying I'm the best at it, one thing I do pride myself on, though, is I do go through and go, "Okay, like, how many limitations can I put on the client intentionally to mitigate them making mistakes so that more or less my goal, which is always-- It's, I'm probably chasing something that's not possible, but my goal is to make it so that the mistakes that they make are content ones, ones that I really can't control, where they're writing the blog post and they made a typo, or they're writing the blog post and they wrote the wrong blog post or something silly like that. I mean, that's out of my control, unfortunately. But systematically, I don't want them to enter, like, a phone number in, and then they actually entered in someone's email. You know, try to stop it at that level, just as a quick example.

Mikhail: I, I'd, I think you're selling yourself a little short there. I think you are [00:22:00] one of the best at creating a good UX for clients. I think that's something that, like, I, I think you... Yeah,

Matt: you

Mikhail: yeah, I think, I think that's something that you've spent a lot of time on, and not only that, you, you provide, like, solid documentation as well around the thing.

So, like, the, I- as far as I understand, there's not really many agencies that offer that level of support. They all just have, like, "This is our CMS, and we roll it out for everyone. You're gonna have to figure it out." And then they let their clients stumble through it. I do think that you have provided, like, over-the-top support for a lot of our clients, and, uh, yeah, don't sell yourself short on, sell yourself short on that because that kind of level of support is what sticks with people a lot of the time and what makes them come back.

And obviously, like we've mentioned before on the podcast, our, our small business is purely referral driven and purely, like, well, even not even referral anymore. It's like our clients just keep coming back, right? So [00:23:00] yeah, there's, there's really, there's really only that. So yeah, I, yeah, don't sell yourself short on that.

There aren't, I don't think there are many out there that could do what you did with the, uh, the CMS UX

Matt: Well, no, I appreciate that because I do, I do spend a lot of time on it, and I, like, send people videos. If they're local, I'll even drive out to help them, uh, if, if that's what they want. And yeah, I do try to make sure that it's like I do not want them to be blocked by, especially by just updating the website.

Like, that is something that I really don't want them to be blocked by 'cause that's just annoying. I gotta update my hours, but I gotta call my web guy and wait. Like, that's so frustrating, right? Like, that's so annoying

Mikhail: Yep

Matt: On to Question number two: What type of website is it? Very crucial question. Different websites have different priorities. common answers to this question is gonna be a brochure or a business website, something that I would also sometimes even call a business card website, depending on the size. So a brochure is something that, is something that is kind of... not much [00:24:00] really interactive there. You're just trying to do a quick, a quick, uh, bit of, uh, marketing. This could be kind of almost synonymous with a landing page, although it might be a few pages. Same with a small business website. Small business website, we still hear this in the industry where we have like a s- a s- a static five-page small business website.

That's where someone who, you know, has a business, wants an online presence to some extent, but isn't gonna be in there every day updating. Those five pages might sit there for literally 10 to 15 years just being some sort of presence there because they get all their business from some other means, referrals, or maybe Google My Business on there, uh, like on G- from Google Maps or, or other searches, things like that. And so that would be like a small business website, something like that. that, like, right there, you're thinking, "Okay, like, do I even really need a CMS?" You know, like what type of website is this? Like, can I just make it, and it's just gonna sit there kind of thing. Same goes with some other landing pages as well, of course, a business card website like I mentioned, where we call a business card website almost like [00:25:00] they're...

Your whole website is a landing page where you're just like, "Hey, my customers really like me. Here's two testimonials. Call me up. Here..." And maybe a brief description of what I do. Is it SEO Is it, you know, ranking on every SEO thing possible? Absolutely not. Because again, they're getting their business typically from somewhere else, and they just want that online presence for when someone tries to search them out. But then another common answer is gonna be a blog. Right away, you're like, "Okay, well, what does that mean?" You know, is this, is this a company that really, really needs good SEO? Is this a blog for internal purposes? What is this, right? What type of blog is this? Is this a, blog, but it's actually more documentation, which I would actually consider its own type of website. So, uh, 'cause some people will say, "No, no, like all, you know, it's just a blog, but all we do is guides for our internal employees," or, "All we do is guides for our, for our product." It's like, okay, well, you can... documentation's, I would say, more dry in terms of tone in comparison to a blog post, even if they're [00:26:00] both a guide covering how to do something, but some people will just have one tone, and they'll just use like a documentation tone.

So even that's another question that you, you know, can have a conversation with, uh, with your customer. Because when it comes to a CMS, their taxonomies make a, uh, make a huge difference, especially in documentation. Having a good taxonomy structure of like, know, what's products, what services do we need?

Do you have both? Do you have different categories within those? Are those services specific to the year? A prime example is accounting. this, these pages and these documents that we're providing, let's say PDF download links on our website, these are for the 2026 tax year. That's crucial information. So that almost could use its own taxonomy where it's like tax documents right? Kind of having like a bit of a hi- hierarchical tier there. Something to consider there. Portfolio website is a prime example. So Your SEO is gonna be tailored a little bit there, where you, you're gonna take a look and you're gonna be like, "Okay, well, we [00:27:00] might be trying to target the population at large, but what we really are trying to target is, uh, is who is gonna hire this person." that could be the population at large if they're a freelancer, but it could be specific companies, and you can take a look at the needs of those specific companies and try to have blog posts or content or projects that are shown off in the portfolio that tailor... So, like, if Microsoft is having a terrible problem with AI buttons, for some reason, I don't know, and you really wanna work at Microsoft, then offer solutions in your portfolio to AI buttons, and then you can have some SEO in there so some of their recruiters might find it, but you can also then, because it's prepared, link to them.

If you get into interview round one or two or whatever and they ask for more information or what have you, you can say, "Oh, I actually have solved some AI button problems. Here's my page to it, uh, on my portfolio website." A podcast, another whole thing. Does it ne- require RSS? Does it not? Get the schema, the schema, schema data going. Uh, get all that stuff all set up. Link to... Do you wanna link to just specific services? [00:28:00] Like, do you only care about Spotify and Apple Podcasts? Do you actually care about more than that? What do you, what do you care about? And so you have to think about that. Is it a video podcast? Are you embedding it on the page? Et cetera, et cetera. another very, very common one, and immediately you're thinking, "Okay, is this e-commerce based?" In other words, this whole website is e-commerce. Maybe we're talking Shopify. If they only care about selling, maybe we're talking Shopify. But it e-commerce, but a huge blog that has, like, 10,000 pages and all these things that link to the products?

Okay, maybe we wanna bring WordPress and a WooCommerce set up in there. Just kinda loosely thinking, right? Documentation is another one. Like I mentioned, it's more dry, very taxonomy driven. Uh, there's gonna be tons of ways to format this. There's Wiki plugins, for example. There's Wiki CMS, like, ones that are very good at making wikis.

Maybe that's what you need. You want an internal wiki, or even a wiki for the [00:29:00] public and you want them to just be able to... Again, very, very dry. to some extent, like, certainly SEO'd, but you're not taking on the tone of, like, "Hey, everybody, this is so exciting," and, like, "Let's take a look at how to make buttons."

Like, that's not it. It's just sorta like, "A button is a clickable," or, like, you know, very, very dry. Very, very, like, kind of lecture-y, if you will. website, this is one I hear less and less about. I kept hearing about membership websites, holy man, like, five, six years ago constantly. "You can make a membership website, membership website." There was membership features in Webflow that I think are, are dead completely, if not maybe there's some remnants of it around. But there, there were membership features of Webflow that I never touched, um, at all, so maybe they're still there, but I'm pretty sure they are gone because Webflow's u- undergone quite a bit of changes.

But no one has ever asked me to make a membership website for them a- a period, 'cause I think- When we were kinda coming on the scene, it was like th- like the peak of its popularity, and then down it, down it came. But membership website, totally something [00:30:00] that exists, absolutely, especially for niche things.

So I have a friend, uh, who told me that, uh, I'm gonna actually anonymize the niche 'cause it's a very, very niche thing, so, but he was telling me how, oh, there's, um He's like he knew, he knew this guy who was, like, really skilled, uh, and he was, like, trained as, like, a, whatever, marine biologist or something. And it was like, okay, what fish are in these rivers? And there's a niche amount of people that need to know the fish that are in those rivers for commercial purposes. I don't know what commercial purposes that has. So he makes a daily podcast, a daily podcast about the fish that are in this particular region.

Gets hundreds, not thousands, hundreds of listens, those translate into massive amounts of money. And that would be an example of somebody that might have a membership site where it's like, "Hey, sign up for this membership, get these podcasts," or, "Sign up for this membership to get this report in a PDF as well," because obviously the report makes, is, you know, very important to these people if they're paying hundreds of dollars for the reports. [00:31:00] So again, the, there's so many niches out there. News website, very, very similar to a blog website, you're gonna be really heavy SEO. You're also gonna have to contend with potentially local regulations or even international regulations, depending on, uh, the type of reporting and things that you report on.

And then a community as well. Sometimes you just want a forum, and that's fine. I know forums, people say are, are old and dated and yada, yada. Forums are still around. I mean, Reddit is kinda just a big forum. I know it's like a social media forum, but it's kinda just a forum. there's communities out there that are totally just chatting.

They're just chatting in forums, posting their pictures, doing stuff. Is that stuff SEO'd? Absolutely not. And so that's another consideration when it comes to your CMS is, okay, I'm gonna use WordPress for this. Can WordPress have community features? Yeah, but maybe we shouldn't do that. Maybe we should use one that is specific for forums.

Just literally install a forum. I remember way back in the day, I haven't used this in years, I used vBulletin for me [00:32:00] and my friends. We had, like, a little gaming clan in high school or maybe before and, and, like, that was it. There was no SEO. We weren't trying to appeal to the public at large. We were just posting, "Oh, I got this score in COD," and little silly things like that, right?

Lasted only, like, a few months or a year or something, but still, it was something that served our needs, and that was the CMS for us, vBulletin. Good enough, done, boom, no WordPress, no nonsense, and that was it

Mikhail: I, I, I feel like there's probably m- many more that we didn't discuss. O-one of them would be SaaS. Um, so s- some subscription-based, you know, application with, uh, with the whole, like, you know, different tiered flows and stuff like that. That's a pretty big one that I've worked on a few times now. Um, there's probably way more.

Sports pages, I don't know. Uh, but, like, this does impact what kind of agency you are, too. I think for us, we typically are in the small, like, the, the brochure website. We do a lot of those. We've done blogs. [00:33:00] I don't know if you-- if a particular agency is better at just narrowing down and being like, "We're only the e-commerce agency."

I've, I've heard that a lot because e-commerce obviously usually leads to a lot of money flowing through it, so they're willing to spend more. Exactly, yeah. Exactly, yeah. So, like, I, I see agencies kind of picking their niche maybe right-- Like, initially they go wide, and then they're like, "Oh, we make way more money in e-commerce," and they just go down that path.

Um, but I'm just curious, like, i-i-if it makes sense to be a little bit more narrow. I think we are pretty wide in what we offer in terms of services. Pretty wide, yeah. But... And, and that's how we kind of like, you know, um, advertise ourselves for the most part is, like, uh, we're, we're good, we're good at a lot of different things.

Um, but I've always wondered if it-- if, if... what if we focused all of our attention on SaaS or e-commerce and see what, see where that lead us. So yeah, curious what the [00:34:00] community thinks about that

Matt: It i- it is something that I, I often think about as well, 'cause it is kind of... It, it- it's a question in my mind of like, okay, should we niche down into something? can niche down into something s- more specific. You could say, "I'm the golf course website guy. I'm making golf course websites." I mean, that's really niche, and it kind of covers a few options.

Like, e-commerce could be in there, but some courses just want you to call, so it could just be a marketing website and things like that. But, I mean, that course could also have videos. It could have quite a bit of media. Like, I've seen courses post videos of their course. I've also seen them post videos of lessons, like sample lessons where they're like, "Hey, this is our instructor. This is, like, a little sample lesson." You have a 40-minute lesson when you book with them. Here's three minutes of their instruction, of their instruction style. You know, boom, there you go, right? So it's a little more media-based. some of them, some courses will very, very, very much be embrace, uh, again, full embrace of, of social media. Other courses will want to do all of their announcements on their website and will not announce anything or [00:35:00] market at all on social media. So it is, like, a wide... Even though you've niched down, it's a wide berth, and so it's hard to niche down because it's like a grass is always greener situation where you're like, "Oh, I'm just gonna work with this one type of customer." But then it's like also, okay, but, like, is that too small of a net even though the umbrella could be kind of wide if you choose something like golf or, like, another niche like that? it's, uh, it's a good question. I don't know. For agencies, it's a good question. I'd, uh, if any agency owners out there listening, or people who have worked at an agency that has niched down or, like, have thought of niching down, that'd be a, a, an excellent comment.

I'd love to read that, 'cause I, I'm, I'm curious about those insights for sure. Question number three. of seven. Number three, how often will it change? This one's easy to just think of, but it's also very important. How often will it change? Now, here's the thing. You think, "Well, who cares? You log in, you do your thing, that's it." Kinda, but maybe not. Here's the thing. If the website is changing very, very quickly, do you wanna change it outside of the CMS? Prime example, what if somebody [00:36:00] wants to have a part of the website driven by their RSS feed? spend all this time producing a podcast or some sort of audio show, uh, or even some sort of written material that is primarily sent out via RSS.

Again, there's niches of all kinds out there. Do you want to constantly have to do the RSS game, but then also go into the CMS? not. Or maybe you want your CMS to power your RSS. There are multiple ways to run this, and that's just one example. I've seen people where they have emailed bots or just emailed their CMS, and it will draft up a blog post for them. This, this comes in with this question, how often will it change? Also, who's updating it kind of plays into this a bit too. worked with many business owners that are incredibly scatterbrained. They're like what I call, like, a stereotypical s- serial entrepreneur, talking a mile a minute. I've come into meetings where I'm working and I've only ever worked on business A with them, and they're talking about business C.

And I go, "What are you... [00:37:00] What are you talking about? I didn't know you sold boat motors." And it's like, "Oh, shoot, you're the, you know, you're not the boat motor guy." Like, that's how scatterbrained that they are. Those people would benefit from, "I'm gonna go into my email client. I'm gonna press..." You know, com- uh, man, I almost said C for, like, uh, the old BlackBerry days where I would just press C to compose. "I'm just gonna go in there, hit, hit compose, write up whatever the heck it is I want. It's all rich text, images, links, everything. I'm just gonna email that to my website. It'll get drafted, and then my media team will handle it." So how often will it change plays into that angle as well, the amount it will change also makes sen- also make, makes a difference with the CMS as well.

So for example, a landing page may never change. So do you need a CMS at all? Eh, probably not. A restaurant may change every few months. They're changing the menu up. Do they even have the menu up there? Like, who knows? And I do wanna say something here, is that you wanna remove as much friction as possible for people updating their website.

Mike and I have already talked about that. But here's the thing, is that you wanna, you wanna reduce, you wanna reduce those, [00:38:00] those, those barriers also because of the update amount. something is even just a tickle annoying- Someone's probably not gonna do it, and then that's not good 'cause you start... At least for me, uh, if I go on a, on a website and I see, okay, your menu's this, and I show up to your restaurant and your menu just isn't updated, I'm not, like, gonna, like, storm out and yell at you or anything s- like, silly like that.

However, I am gonna be in the back of my mind thinking, "Who didn't update the website? You guys should be a little bit more on top of it." And again, I'm not overly crucial. I'm not gonna be like, "Okay, one star. Your website wasn't up to date." But it's just a little thing where you're like, "Oh, that's... Hmm." You know?

Just a little didn't, didn't, didn't cross that T, didn't dot that I. A blog is something, for example, that needs to be often updated weekly, maybe even daily, and then the news, very similar, needs to be updated daily. So what do you need out of stuff like that? You need it to be performance, you need it to be versatile, and you need it to be ready to take on different things. You may have two months where nothing is embedded, no embedded videos. The next [00:39:00] month, a bunch of embedded videos come in, and your CMS better be ready to handle that 'cause it's rapid fire, again, daily or weekly updates going at it like crazy. What about a large marketing team? Large marketing team, what does that mean? You could literally have 100 people. of them could be logged into the CMS at a time, so you need it to be very performant but also ready to take on that amount of people. But then also, it's gonna be updated constantly, and so you're gonna wanna have, like, good systems in there. Something like, for example, WordPress will have, like, revisions, where you can go in and be like, "Hey, I updated that."

"No, I updated it." "Okay, hang on. Let's just check the revisions. We can go back," a little bit of that version control. That's really key. Something like Webflow kinda struggles in this area, where, yeah, you could pay for multiple people to log into the website and, you know, do, do that. I don't know if it's up to 50.

There's... They constantly change the limits. But you could do that. But I will say that the Webflow CMS will struggle in this way. It will really struggle in this way. It is not as strong at being a publication level CMS [00:40:00] as something like WordPress is. also, there are many proprietary or extremely expensive enterprise CMS out there that may accommodate large marketing teams better because they'll have... If you have a large marketing team, you have to start thinking about that people question again, where you're like, "Okay, we need a bunch of, we need a bunch of analytics. We want this attached to our CRM. We want people to be able to, like, email in their blog posts. We wanna have people to... We wanna have multiple people log in." It's a big job, right? And so large marketing team, how often will it change? A lot. then those other questions start coming, rolling back in, and you're like, "Okay, hang on. This thing has to be quite capable

Mikhail: This is one of those ones where we've been caught on, um, and it bit us in the ass pretty bad. So I think, I think it's happened twice, I'm not sure. But I remember one vividly was a massive page where we had a whole talk about how we're gonna handle updates and everything like that. This was one of our first big projects, [00:41:00] and we had a whole conversation.

We were like, "Hey, like, you can either send the updates to us and we'll handle them, and then we'll charge you a monthly fee, or we can build out a CMS for you, and you can handle them yourself and all that." And they, they chose the l- uh, former, where they, they were just gonna send the updates to us. But at the end of the day, that didn't work out because the time zone-- There was a time zone issue at the time, and then there was a, uh, just, like, a, a massive amount of updates.

Like, initially it was supposed to be like, "Oh, we'll update you once a week." This was like every day, five, six different updates every single day, and they needed to be done as soon as possible every single time. So it just didn't work out. We had to whole renego- renegotiate a whole new deal about re-retrofitting the website into a CMS.

Whole ordeal. So getting this down and getting an understanding of what the customer actually needs versus what the customer thinks they need is super important. Uh, erring on the side of, okay, if they're saying they wanna update sometimes, they probably wanna update quite a bit or something like that.

[00:42:00] Like, just erring on the side of caution in this particular case before creating them a static page that they get pissed off about that they can't update. Again, it-- this plays in from many different angles. This is an angle from, you know, customer satisfaction. This is an angle from customers actually being able to use their site properly.

So I think more often than not these days, Matt, correct me if I'm wrong, we're leaning towards CMS, uh, for most websites. I think we do still do the occasional static site for, like, one-off customer types. But, like, for the most part, because of the times we've been burned, I, I lean towards a CMS for a customer, even if they're like, "Oh, we're gonna only update it every, every few months."

Matt: Yeah, I, I will say that most of the time we will do, we will do CMS, because here's the thing is, like, if you start with static, are static, and you're also static in how much you can move. In other words, not just the content, but the instant that someone comes onto their, their team, like they hire a new marketing person and they go, "I wanna write blog posts," that requirement is [00:43:00] so regular, so mundane now, and I don't mean it's, like, mundane to have a blog.

What I mean is is that ev- like a lot of places have blogs. It's not like a, an, a big extravagant ask. And many of the things that they may ask for, "Hey, I wanna update the hours. Hey, I wanna do this. Hey, I wanna do that," that is totally within the realm of just simply hiring a new marketing person, and that'll immediately need a CMS. So, like, there's not much wiggle room with static where... 'Cause, like, we, we've been asked, we've made a static website for a customer years and years and years ago, and literally seven years, six years, but later the person reaches out, their wife reaches out and says, "I need login information to the

Mikhail: Yep

Matt: to change it." I'm like, "There is no login information." this is... I'm talking it was seven years, and this was over 10 years ago when we did it, and then seven years past that. So, like, obviously they just kinda like went, "Okay, shoot," and then they just made a new website on some sort of web builder 'cause they, they left that static site the same for, like, seven years.

So, you know, whatever. Like, it kinda sucks they have to update. But at the same time, if we did have a login, we may [00:44:00] still have that customer kicking around. Maybe we would've been able to do their update, right? So just from a business perspective, but also from a versatility or like, "Hey, I can, you know, move around," kinda perspective, it's, uh, it's, it's huge Question number four. How much custom functionality? So here's the thing. Sometimes you're building a website, sure, that's the kind of the focus of this website or this episode, but sometimes you're building an application, meaning a web app, and sometimes you're building, uh, something unique. You're building something that's like a hybrid. Maybe there's like a very small web app which is just one page. People log in, they just do that one page, they manage some stuff, but it's very, very simple. You know, things like that. So co-co-common examples, things like forms, you know, bookings, events. Bookings and events have been sold to death. There's tons of bookings and events, options and offerings, and like plugins WordPress plugins for other different CMSs or just CMSs that are like tailored towards it.

But here's the thing, is everyone has a custom thing for their thing. "Hey, I only wanna sell 10 tickets. These are super [00:45:00] advanced." Or, "I only wanna sell 10 tickets, but as, as the amount of tickets go down, I want the price to go up," or, you know, whatever. There's always some little nuance there where people say like, "Hey, I need this information in there.

I need this," and so there's gonna be some custom functionality with bookings and events, at least in my experience. I've installed massive, like a massive software suite for events, and then three questions in I'm like, oh my God, like the, the thing that they need, it doesn't... Like this feature doesn't exist.

Like they asked me late in the process. They're like, "Hey, like we can just do this, right?" Now I gotta build a plugin on a plugin and it's like a whole, like a whole mess, right? But custom functionality also includes memberships. are you allowing your users to do? Can they log in? Can they not? Are they getting like a promo code?

Like what does the membership entail, and what does that have? Is the membership access to a little web app? Who knows. Customer dashboards as well. We mentioned those a little bit where, do the, do the marketing teams want a little touch of analytic information? Do they not when they're editing the blog post? Uh, do [00:46:00] they want a full dashboard without logging into Google, Google Analytics? So now it's kind of more web app-ish where like might even have another subdomain for them where it's like marketing dot, you know, that whatever website .com, and then they log into that, and it's like a unique console that you used and plugging into all their analytics softwares altogether.

So now like that is, ends up actually being the complex thing, is that a CMS? Is that fully custom? You know, how does all that work? That's gonna be like a real big question. Um, APIs is a big question, especially when we're talking headless. We haven't really talked about headless too much 'cause it is kinda more rare.

But here's the thing. A lot of infor- a lot of businesses are information heavy, and they, that information gets streamed out to multiple places, like a mobile app, a web app- A website, landing pages, the list goes on. And so if they're really, really, if they're really, really like information-heavy, something like a [00:47:00] headless CMS, and then the corresponding API to pull that information from that one solo source of information really, you know, begs a lot of questions.

'Cause here's the thing, let's say you choose a, a custom CMS, and you don't know how many content boxes you need. So you have a, form where it says, you know, add a content box. You don't know if you need three or six. Sometimes you need nine. Who knows? You wanna be able to allow the person to add and remove content boxes just, you know, quickly, kind of like a repeatable field. But what if that headless CMS doesn't have that? Or what if the API doesn't allow you to pull it in that way? It always says, "Oh, you can't pull it dynamically. You have to pull all nine." Or, you know, you can't just pull three. You have to pull all nine, or you, you have to pull just three. You can't pull nine, right?

There's limitations and different things in the API. So you really need to look at that from both ends, from what the CMS is offering, but what also what the, the needs are of the customer, and really make a, a choice there because, like a headless CMS, if they're information-heavy like that, is chances are what they need.

[00:48:00] However, it's the APIs and things like that are definitely proprietary. And what are they pulling it into? Sometimes someone will use a headless CMS and then pull that information into a WordPress. Very, very rare, but it is possible because maybe the marketing team demands WordPress, but they still want the, the information-heavy stuff to come out of the information, like the solo one place of truth. So now it's like, okay, well, how do we have an API work with WordPress here? How does that work? it work? So th- this is a, this is a big, big question. And then this li- li... The, the APIs naturally lend themselves into, for custom functionality, third-party integrations. this person is selling trips and they only work with Air Canada, and Air Canada has some sort of special plugin that they allow people to use, resellers use or something, just making that up off, off the fly, but let's just say that exists, that CMS that you use for them better have compatibility with that Air Canada plugin, or else you're gonna be adding a bunch of custom functionality to try to get it to work, if that's even possible. they might say no, like, you know, again, just making this [00:49:00] whole scenario up, but Air Canada may say, "We're a Webflow partner. That's it. Like we have exclusive... All our resellers must use a Webflow website," right? Business partnership there. If that's the case, guess you're using Webflow. If you need more custom functionality, I guess are you using headless as well?

Like what are you doing, right? So these questions, as you can see, it's starting to snowball and kinda like go back in on itself, like where we're touching on question one, question three again, things like that. Because as these questions go, you're starting to like put together kind of like an engineering schema, where you're really starting to think, "Okay, what do we, you know, what, what is it that we need here?"

Mikhail: The, the third party integrations one's probably the biggest one that I wanna kinda emphasize here, uh, because it's scary in a way. A lot of times, like when someone's like, "Oh, I just need this to integrate with this random CRM," for example, and you're like, "Oh shit," like there's nothing that exists that can really do that, or i- if it is, like, you know, there's a lot of integration there.

To be f- to be quite honest with you, most [00:50:00] of the money that you're gonna make is going to be probably from third party integrations. Because of the complexity level and the importance that businesses put on these, like, different, uh, metrics platforms. Like I, I remember one customer I was working for had, I think, six different analytics platforms that we had to integrate with for s- for like different teams and legacy stu- like just all over the place, plus like a CRM, plus like all this stuff.

90% of the development work went into keeping up those integrations. That's the reality. The, like that, those integrations employed a team of like six developers. That's the crazy part. All the rest of the site was like a standard e-commerce website that really only needed one or two people. The rest of the team was heavily working on troubleshooting all the bullshit that happens with those integrations.

So for us as developers, that's, that's the golden goose. Like a, a- as weird as it is, if you can find a, a, a company that needs a lot of third party integrations, you're gonna be there for a very long time because the ine- they will inevitably break, [00:51:00] they will inevitably update, they will inevitably need extra functionality on top of them.

They make all of the complexity, period. Like I, I am not, I'm not kidding. Uh, if you're a customer and you're coming at this from like a, you know, I'm creating something perspective, uh, yeah, try to avoid them. Just to be f- just to be real. Like, yeah, some of them you can't avoid, but like, don't add in multiple analytics providers.

Don't add in a CRM just for the sake of having your CRM connect. Like, try to figure out ways to do it more simply, rather than putting complexity onto a website that doesn't need complexity. That's just my s- that, just my advice, but as developers, try to find it. That's, those are the websites that are gonna constantly be paying you money to, to maintain

Matt: I mean, 100% because with third-party integrations, those third parties are not gonna listen to you. They're moving goalposts. You might say, "Oh, thank God I got the titles to sync," and then they decide, no, titles don't [00:52:00] sync. They actually sync with the rich text field. So now you have to go in and, like, parse out the title from the rich text field 'cause you're requesting alt text instead of just the title.

Like, that's a, that's a very simple example, but you can see how crazy it'll get, especially with payment partners and other things, the third-party integration. So Mike's 100% correct. You know, just as a kind of, like, a side note is, like, totally engineer this thing to be, you know, simple. Like, the, the, the whole, like, KISS, like, keep it simple, stupid, like, absolutely is something that you should consider when you have a CMS 'cause you do not wanna be the person that's constantly making a stupid plugin or constantly making, like, a, a little plugin or a little bit of an interface for these third-party integrations, especially when those third-party integrations, you know, may... L-like, like, w- for example, one of the worst things is when you rely on something on WordPress. Like, let's say you have WordPress, you have a plugin that's an official plugin. You rely on that information, and then that official plugin gets shut down or isn't maintained anymore. Something happens, you can't use it anymore. Okay, great. But what if that third party doesn't have an API or a way to get that information out? [00:53:00] Now what? And if that was mission critical, now what? what if, what if you're, like, a site that's, like, an affiliate marketing website and you need up-to-date pricing, and that pricing thing doesn't exist anymore? what? you have to make a whole web scraper? What if that website has, like, a web scrape, like, blocker, and so now you're, like, trying to, like, circumvent this web scrape? It's a m- it's a mess. You could see it, you could see it, you know, for su- like, slowly but surely becoming a mess, an example of, you know, a complication that really, really could arise due to a third-party integration Question number five.

These get a little bit simpler, so we won't be, you know, super long, long tail on them. So question number five, who maintains it? This one we kind of already touched on. You might think this is a repeat of, like, who will update the website. That's not true, because who maintains it is absolutely who's doing updates. So some follow-up questions here. Who's doing updates? We already covered that. However, fixing broken plug-ins? Who's monitoring security? Who's paying for hosting? Who's paying for a domain name? Who's available when something [00:54:00] breaks? cetera. Like, w- we've had so many customers where I'll go to them, I'll build them something like a WordPress website, and I will say to them, "Hey, this thing should probably have updates done on a s- on a pretty regular basis.

Monthly ideally. Quarterly is still okay in most cases. So, you know, I should be involved on a regular basis." And they say, "Okay, thanks for your service," and no contact. I then get called back, or I don't get called back sometimes, and I just see that it's just a nightmare. So, like, someone calls me back two years later. They've been u- misusing post types. They didn't follow any of the training materials. Things are all over the place. They tried to add their own plug-ins. They didn't update other plug-ins. They have duplicate plug-ins where they have, like, two e-commerce plug-ins 'cause they didn't understand that there was already one there. They're trying to, like, ma- send emails. The emails are failing half the time 'cause they got two SMTP plug-ins and they're messing around. The amount of times this has happened is, is, has been a lot. Like, a lot, a lot. And I've, I've either seen it 'cause they've called me back and asked for help, or I've seen it because they, they did not do that and I just, like, went, 'cause I was curious, went to their public website [00:55:00] and was, oh, this, this homepage is a mess. I've seen a classic one where, uh, you set up, like, a hero, and you set a big, you know, big H1, and it says, like, "Welcome to," you know, "Matt's Convenience Store." That's what it's meant for, Matt's Convenience Store. That- that's what it's for, right? Big H1 there, welcome, whatever. The person will go in and be like, "Oh, that's a great place for an announcement."

So then they write up a paragraph of, like, the latest, like, there's toilet paper on sale for $3.99 only from this date to this date. Well, that looks terrible now. You have this font that's just way out of whack. It's massive. Your, your H1 shouldn't be that to begin with, and it's just a nightmare, and it looks horrible, and it's, like, so clearly, like, they wanted an, an announcement system and they just didn't know how to do it.

They didn't have it, know, ready or whatever, and so that's it. So they just used the thing that was closest to them. And it's like, hey, could've been there to guide you. I could've been there to been like, "Hey, we can, like, install an announcement plug-in," or I can write one custom, like, with custom code and things. Things like that. Of course, [00:56:00] security is a big thing, especially now Well, I mean, it kind of always was, but especially for e-commerce, especially with these AIs running around breaking into things, what you want is you wanna make sure that things are kept up to date, but you also wanna make sure that things are paid for. Classic is I maintain the website and everything, someone doesn't renew the domain. They call me, the website's down. I look at it, the domain, they didn't, they didn't renew their domain. Where's the domain at? Don't know. You wouldn't tell me. customers will do that. They'll register their own domain as a part of their business plan and that, and then they don't know where the registrar is. I'm like, "I really can't help you," because in some cases, I can buy the domain myself if you're okay with me doing that and then connect it up, but in many cases, they have a protection on there for, like, three months, six months, eight months, nine months where I can't buy it 'cause the host is... the registrar is gonna lock it down from purchase, from immediate purchase after expiry. And so now what, right? And now you have a big problem. And then some places will retain your, let's say you main- like, let's say you had to change your NS records to get the website working. Some places will retain [00:57:00] that information. Some people will throw all that away. They'll throw away all your DNS information and it's...

And then when you get it back, it's like, oh, now we gotta re-set up the DNS, and it causes this huge problem. So maintenance across multiple areas is really key, and it does play into the CMS. A of the things I'm talking about is not necessarily the CMS, but here's the thing. It, it is the CMS to an extent because something like WordPress plugins is a key thing. You will... If you do your updates, fine. You can do your updates 100 times and have no problems. On 101, you hit update. Now you got the white screen of death. You don't have an up- you don't have a backup. You don't know what's been broken. You don't know what broke, how it broke, why it broke. It could just be a RAM limitation, a memory shortage.

So you kinda need, like, a tech there. And so, like, knowing who's gonna maintain what is absolutely crucial. And, and with that, for example, we had a small business who absolutely just, like, absolutely refused for any sort of IT help, not paying it. Like, n- they're not paying a dollar for anything, like, period. They're paying for the website. They're not paying a dollar. Okay. [00:58:00] So then we did do WordPress for them because we wanted them to, at the very least, be able to press update on those plugins. Now, hit problems down the road, but again, like, I can o- you can only insulate someone so far. And, and those same people, I recommended we go to service.

I was like, "Use WordPress.com or, you know, use, use Webflow. Use a, a, a fully self-hosted service. They handle all the security and all that junk, and you just do it." Nope, that costs more money per month. Some people just won't budge. So you just do what you can do, help them best you can, but, you know, what are you gonna do after that? Number six is an obvious one. Left it close to the end though because it's kind of redundant and it was like everyone's gonna ask this. What's the budget? What's the budget? We found a CMS one time, Mike, it was over... What was it? $50,000 to get a backup server. Remember that? We were looking at the pricing chart and it's like, "Oh, yeah, backup server, $49,999."

US, by the way. We're in Canada, so add 30-ish percent, at least at this point. Uh, that's a big freaking [00:59:00] investment, so maybe don't do that. Uh, we've also had incidents where people would sign up for, uh, things like they would get a CMS specifically, uh, to get a plugin to plug into a CRM, and then they'd pay for the CRM, and they'd pay for all this stuff, and they didn't even know what the CRM was.

They just heard that web businesses should have a CRM. They didn't know what the CRM was. Well, if you don't know what a CRM is and you don't have any plans to use it and there's no business need for it, why are we paying for the licensing and all that, right? That takes away from the budget. So the budget works in both ways.

The budget is you don't want to squander it on things like that, but you... it also gives you a baseline. So we have to know right away, are you capable of paying the 30 or whatever it is dollars, because it keeps changing, for Webflow a month? Like, do you want the self-hosted experience or the, fully hosted experience where you don't do the hosting or anything? Okay, great. Can you afford that? Because when you're on Webflow's turf, you're on their terms. If you can't afford this or if this is maxing your budget out and, and a [01:00:00] single price increase of a dollar will make it so you can't afford this website anymore, maybe that's not the way to go. Maybe we're going to have to start using an open source tool, gonna have to start doing a self-hosted WordPress, a little bit more involved for the maintenance, but we're able to control the budget a little more, right? And also there's other common budget items as well. Your hosting is big. You might say that's not the CMS, but it is because is the CMS of your choice compatible with the hosting you chose? You can't just choose the cheapest hosting and then have it be incompatible with the WordPress or the other CMS that you chose.

You can't, you know, you can't have best of both worlds necessarily. So you have to take a look and say, "Okay, is my hosting... Like, can I afford this hosting and can it accommodate the CMS that I, I wanna use?" Premium plugins is huge. Those are usually a SaaS and they're, they cost a whole bunch of money. You'll get nickel and dimed to death, especially if your website has a ton of features, so you have to look out for that. Same with themes. Themes might be a one, one purchase, but they could also be a SaaS, and you gotta wa- look out [01:01:00] for that. If you can't afford the $10 for y- you know, a premium plugin on WordPress, you can't afford the f- the, the $20 to plug in a third-party service to your headless CMS, uh, you're in trouble, man.

Like, y- you know, you're in trouble. You gotta, you gotta really take a look at this, at this budget. Here's the thing, maintenance is a thing. is a thing, and maintenance and repairs are a thing. Things, things will break down. People think that just 'cause it's a website or it's digital, it'll be up all the time and everything's gonna be all hunky-dory.

Not the case, unfortunately. Things break down just like a car, just like anything else, maintenance and repairs, you need to have some sort of budget for that, or at least I highly recommend it. Some people get away with it for years without needing it and then bam, one day they're in trouble. And if they're right in that budget really close, it's really serious. Training is another one. Like I said, I do train my clients up. If they need a lot of training, I will charge a training rate. of agencies will do that. That's something that needs to be considered in the budget as well. And [01:02:00] also for the CMS in the training space, is that CMS easy to use? Like, so think about it.

If it's a really complex, very unorthodox CMS that plugs into, like, every marketing tool known to mankind, okay, fantastic. But adding a page might not be, like, the same as pressing add a page button. It might be like add asset as an allocation of page type. O- So, like, that's gonna require a lot of training now.

You're gonna have to have someone who is very specialized in that and knows that CMS very well, which is probably s- a niche to begin with, a, a niche person at that point. Then you're gonna have to pay for many more hours of training because it's a very... It's not just like click here and then click add page. you know, so your training has to come in, you know, come into account as well. other small things like developer time, that's your maintenance and your, like, future redesigns of things, and your future redesigns. Another budget, another budget thing. If, if you're working with a CMS that is extremely static for some reason and you're worried [01:03:00] about future redesigns, like for example, if you're like, "I'm gonna use WordPress right now, but in two years I might just leave WordPress," maybe you want headless, man. Like, maybe you want headless. You want all your information in one consistent place. You pay for your training one time. Everyone learns that one headless CMS, whatever you've chosen, and then you let someone else make ver- uh, a static website that we then eventually dynamically connect to your headless CMS and then boom, there you go. Maybe that's what you want. And, and then, you know, you can play with it, play with it there. So budget seems like an easy thing, but it, it is not

Mikhail: Yeah, and it's, it's also something you use for gating, right? Like, if you have someone that is super gung-ho about creating a website, and then you get to budget or like, uh ... And, and they're like, "Well, I need to edit all these things, I need to do all that." And you're like, "Well, okay, are you ... The, the main- the maintenance fee's gonna be, like, 50 bucks," for example.

And that's a low maintenance fee, to be clear. Uh, and then they start to scoff at like, "Oh, why would I have to pay to continue? Like, I'm just paying you to create the website. Why would I have to con- pay?" Like, that's a good [01:04:00] opportunity to understand where this project is going most likely. Now, it's, it's, it's part on you to, to convince them why you need that f- that, you know, that $50 a month is important.

Um, and some, and some people will listen, right? They scoff and then they listen. That's fine. But a lot of times, what happens when they're scoffing at such a low number is that their budget is just ... Th- they don't have a realistic scope for what a project like this entails. So in that case, it's going to be kind of a losing argument on your end, and you don't wanna go down the route of too much sacrifice.

Now, obviously you could take some stuff down and make it cheaper and stuff like that, but when you get to the point where they're like, "Well, I don't want y- to pay you for hosting. I don't wanna pay you for anything. I don't wanna pay you for email. I don't wanna pay you for,

Matt: Anything. Yeah, like

Mikhail: y- security. Yeah, security.

Like, I j- I just want the website, and maybe I'll pay you five bucks a month or something like that, or 50 bucks a year to check it once in a while." Y- I [01:05:00] would recommend, unless you're starting out, that those are the types of clients you wanna kind of avoid. Because a lot of times they will go against your advice, and what ends up happening is you create this product that you can't even show off and you can't even be proud of.

And yes, you might make that 300 to $500 initially, but at the end of the day, maybe that time would've been better spent working with a client that understands the concept of maintenance and understands the concept of, uh, how you can invest in something that will bring you a return. And that product will inevitably be more successful than a product that is penny-pinched to the degree of, like, just being set up for failure

Matt: Yeah, the budget question really does go beyond the CMS. Like, it really does. It, it, it is something that can very well threaten the entire project. 'Cause like we mentioned, of course, like the plug-ins and the SAS, like if you're... You know, you gotta pay for Elementor, you gotta pay for Gravity Forms, gotta pay for this, gotta pay for [01:06:00] that.

You're getting kind of nickel and dimed to death, although it's different companies. Uh, you know, I get it, but some people are not gonna have that budget, and so your CMS might change. But then Mike raises a very good point where if the person's like, "I'm not paying you anything extra," I mean, ok- I mean, okay, but, like, this...

You know what I mean? We're working within this very, like, this very constrained environment. I mean, I'm not gonna do this for free. I'm not a charity. I don't know how to help you with this, man. You know? Sometimes it's just I don't know what to say. We, we... And, and the thing too is, I mean, this is, this is a...

This leads into question seven, and I'll, like, mention a little story here. How long should it last? That is question seven. The expect- And this is the expected lifespan of the actual website, and this can completely change your recommendation. So here's a, here's a thing. So we have a, we have a, a client that we built him a website very, very early in the, in the early, early days. To this day, I get support requests, and it'll be the site went down, this happened, that happened. Oftentimes it's the host or the host keeps updating his server and [01:07:00] changing the permissions and things. It's a, it's a kind of a mess. And- No money. Like there's... Like that request has no money associated with it. I say, "I'm gonna have to charge you $50," I get no response, no answer. And I understand that people have this thought of like digital products don't break down and digital products need to just sort of run forever and it should run forever 'cause you built the website and things, and thankfully this person isn't like that although they keep requesting help and then not paying.

But anyway, the thing is, is that is it... Would it be absurd for you to order like a shower head repair? Let's say your shower head's leaky, you get a shower head, new one. plumbing is done, plumber comes in, does it. then 10 years later the shower head starts to go again and you call that plumber and say, "I need this done like now, right away," or whatever, "but I'm not gonna pay you." Like that's absurd. Like you installed the shower head, like you are for life indebted to the shower head. That's... just not gonna [01:08:00] happen, man. Just not gonna happen. here's the thing too is, it's like how s- how long should it last? This is where your recommendation might get completely skewed. So for example, what if this website is for one heck of a weekend event? to sell tickets. just for one weekend. They're gonna make all their money on this weekend. It's some big festival or whatever. Okay. Well, maybe we don't need to worry about the long-term SEO side effects and the long-term this and the long-term that. So then choose a CMS that is easy to install, easy to quickly change things on the fly, and easy to take down. Maybe this weekend event happens once a year. One weekend a year, annual event. Okay, one that is easy to, again, take down, but keep all the data with you and have it all be ready to spin up again. So something that's self-hosted might be better for you in that case where you can take a big backup and then take...

or take a full backup and then take the hosting off and everything and don't pay a dime all year. And then next year that weekend comes around three weeks before, [01:09:00] you spin that thing up you just update all the numbers. It's now not $10 to get in, it's $12, it's this hours, it's these days, it's this whatever, and then there you go.

Weekend event, boom. Now you're not paying for a host all year, and when you use a closed system you're not worrying about import, export, messing around, all this stuff. So you know, it can really change your recommendation. Um, if it's a startup MVP speaking, speaking about specifically to their sort of landing page, you may want a CMS attached to that.

It might sound like, "Oh, no, you can just go static." Maybe, but it's a startup's MVP. Things are gonna change rapidly. They're gonna say, "Oh, yeah, it'll come out next week." And then, "No, no, it'll come out next month." Actually, it'll be next quarter, you know, and then there's all this, this nonsense. Or, uh, we're actually gonna try to get another series of funding first and we wanna have a form on there and all this other nonsense.

So a startup MVP, it's like, okay, what's the lifespan of this thing? It could be a month, like they're saying, but prepare for six months. Prepare for a year. It makes, it makes a difference. [01:10:00] local business is a prime example of one where you might say, "Maybe we wanna go static, and we want this thing to last 10 years, so we don't wanna see MS at all." We want this thing to last 10 years. It's just gonna sit there and like, especially like a local bakery or something where it's always like, you know, established in 1888. It's like, "Hey man, you're probably not going anywhere, and all you want is a little online presence. Just have a t- just have a static website." And then maybe you paint your storefront a different color 'cause you're renovating and like we need to put a new picture up, and we can just do that for 50 bucks or whatever, and that's it Hooray. You know, like, you know, so, like, you don't need a CMS in that case at all. But some place like the government, like if it's a government thing, it's probably gonna have to last quite a long time. It's probably gonna change rapidly in the beginning if it's a new thing and then stop changing for a very long time, 'cause they'll forget about it and move on to other things, chances are. But it's probably gonna have to be extremely information heavy and all these other things, and it's gonna have to be secure, especially if it, uh, requires people to log in.

So you're gonna have to make a, a [01:11:00] recommendation on something that's secure, easily updatable, but also ready to just sort of like sit there and not be touched. You're gonna have to, you know, balance those things. Same with universities. Universities, like, their courses will change, but how often? And then also, like, not every single course is gonna have its own landing page necessarily.

It, it might just be in a list of courses, easy like that. But for a university, also y- maybe you have to consider something like their information is for a long time. Like, maybe it's gonna... it is gonna go into their mobile app if they're a bigger university. It is gonna go into their website. It is gonna go into multiple places. Maybe they are gonna have landing pages, and they wanna pull from one source of truth because the university is so large that they have just a ton of news. They have, you know, n- press releases and all this other thing. Okay, maybe it's gonna have to be headless. And then so the... 'Cause, 'cause what you want is you want longevity of information in that case.

And because it's such a volume where some of it's gonna last forever, [01:12:00] like we have a computer science course, like that's gonna last probably a long, long time hopefully. But then, but... Well, maybe not now, but who knows? But anyway, computer science course, you know, that's probably gonna be around. But the thing is, is that you wanna be able to have rapid change information where you're like, "Hey, volleyball practice was moved to 3:00 PM today instead of 4:00." So the longevity of information, but also considering the fact that, like, this information's gonna get piped out everywhere, and you don't wanna have one page say that volleyball practice is still at 4:00 PM when it's actually at 3:00 PM today. So one source of truth, lasts a long time with some rapid changing things, maybe headless is, is your way. Enterprise, that's probably gonna last a long, long time. Usually assume it's gonna last a long, long time. You do need to talk to your client though, because it's gonna be one of these things where if, esp- Like, let's say they're a, a restaurant, which doesn't sound like it's enterprise, but it can be if they're a franchise. They're a franchise, huge franchise. They have a big enterprise CMS. Their information may still rapidly change. We... You always hear that, you know, enterprises kind of [01:13:00] like sit on a lot of information and things. True to an extent, but here's the thing. With restaurant chains, they gotta change their menu items. They gotta change their branding. They gotta change their pictures all the time 'cause they're always renovating new, new storefronts to look different. They're gonna have different variants of businesses. Like Mc- like McDonald's has McCafé. They also have some other drink thing, um, thing. So- Like really look at how long the website should last and, and it will dictate, you know, what, want.

Like if you, if you're using WordPress and you want your enterpr- your information to last a long time, you're using WordPress and there's plugin updates that come out every single day, that's not the way you want it. Maybe you want something that's even a full custom CMS or just a headless CMS. Host the information somewhere else, let someone else handle that, and then you handle these front ends and make it look good

Mikhail: Yeah, this one's tough. Um, I think I get stuck on the fact that most websites should really only [01:14:00] last-- Like, you should really only build for, like, five years at most. As far as I understand, that's, like, the rule of thumb. Now, that, that's, that rule of thumb has been broken in our industry very, like, a lot.

We have many websites that have been around for way longer than five years. Um, and I would say it's-- There-- We have very few that have been around for less, if that makes sense, the ones that we've built for five years. So giving that rule of thumb a big caveat here. But regardless, it's tough to plan past that, in my opinion, when you're building something and when you're, when you're, like, considering the relationship.

If you're, if you have a great relationship with your client and you're there for over five years, great. But the reality is that they should probably be updating their website, like a big, pretty big overhaul if they're serious about the, you know, the inbound traffic that they're getting because so much changes, right?

Like, you know, you go from SEO to a little bit of AI SEO. You go from, [01:15:00] you know, stat, uh, static websites to CMSs. Like, uh, the design patterns change so dra-dramatically in five years usually that you don't wanna be outdated if you're competing with other people in the industry. Like, it's all really about the competition in that sit-situation.

So, like, if you're looking at the competition and you're very highly competitive in the space, you need to be on top of it. Like, you need to have the best performance. You need to have, you know, a good design that c- that, that's, that's relevant in the competition. You need to have a way to, like, do the things that your competitors do.

Let's say your competitors add, like, an online checkout process that n- didn't exist before, you need to be able to do that, right? Then that might change the entire flow of the website. So There's a lot to consider when you're considering longevity inside an app, inside a website when you're selling it to a customer.

I would typically try to sell them on like, okay, you know, if [01:16:00] this is a rapidly changing app, like the startup MVP, great example, yes, we need to be very, very rapid. That might change within a year. Like, that might be a one-year website at most, maybe six months. We might have to redesign it completely. Uh, whereas like with a local business, I would lean towards the competitors.

I would be like, "Okay, let's look at your competitors. These, th-these are the modern competitors. These are the ones that are probably gonna be changing pretty rapidly, so you probably wanna keep up with them every three years or something like that." I would, I would frame it in a way that makes it so that it's not fully their choice, um, because some-- a lot of times it isn't.

Uh, if they wanna stay relevant in a competing market, it's, it's part of the process where they might have to update big chunks of the website. It might not be a full overhaul, but it might be something where they have to spend a chunk of money every three years to five years, depending on the industry they're in

Matt: I- i- it makes a lot of sense. Like, with the startup MVP, like you were saying, you know, with the... Like, you don't really care about [01:17:00] the CMS too much because things are gonna rapidly change so quickly that they might completely outgrow what they're, what they're using and then go to an enterprise CMS. So you don't wanna over-plan by going, "We're gonna go enterprise CMS right away," when maybe just a static site would've worked, or maybe just a quick little headless thing would've worked, or something like that.

You don't wanna, you know, kind of over- there. But then there's gonna be, you know, some projects that have already overshot, meaning, like, the government is probably gonna have an absolute ton of information on whatever project they're hiring you to do, an absolute ton of information, a ton of documentation.

They probably have all that stuff ready, or they, they know that they're gonna add, like, another 150 pages, right? It's government. They're gonna have a ton of pages, a bunch of details, all this stuff, they're gonna have to constantly manipulate it and change it according to the laws and all these other things.

And so for them, think, "Okay, the information is the thing that's important. The SEO just needs to be basic. Someone needs to Google it and, like, find out this, like, you know, niche question about, can I fish on Tuesdays or what- whatever it is." [01:18:00] And then, like, they just need to, they just need to have that information.

They need to have it be right. But we don't need to worry about, like, a marketing level SEO. But then you're 100% right. If you're trying to fight, literally fight off competitors from a business perspective, not literally fighting, you're trying to fight off competitors. Hey, you know, there's two bakeries in this town, and I want my bakery to be better than theirs online.

It's like, okay, well, you're kinda entering a bit of an SEO fight there. And so you might need to, you know, consider in your longevity that you should be getting rid of things every five years, or choose a CMS that you can easily keep the information all the same and keep the editing procedure all the same, but then change the front end and change how it looks and things like that. Absolutely So mo- more or less, these seven questions, I would say, kind of create a, like, a, a rough framework, if you will. A framework for choosing a CMS. And I have in the show notes here a bunch more information about how to sort of apply that framework. Now, there's a million and one caveats, a million and one pieces of nuance, a bunch of different niches, tons of different websites.[01:19:00]

So you might look at here and be like, "Matt, I don't like... Like, I would use WordPress for something else." totally valid, absolutely. But, you know, if you're completely new or you, you're interested in seeing, you know, some of the things that I would use, you know, WordPress for, Webflow, Shopify, a headless CMS, um, sometimes a static site plus a CMS, that's in there, too. Um, and also when not to use a CMS. I have that included in the show notes. You know, you can go check it out on ashingallthethings.com. Link will be in the show notes, or link will be in the, uh, episode description. And, uh, you can go and check, check that out if you're interested in just sort of seeing that, that small section.

But these seven questions, are really the things that I use to determine what CMS I'm gonna use, and, uh, and then also other parts of the project as we've naturally discussed sort of through the course of the episode But I think that's it. That's the episode. If you want to support episodes like this, please do so, and you can do so on Patreon.com.

That's Patreon.com/htmlallthethings. And many thanks to our three tier patrons, Tim from the Web Hacker on thewebhacker.com, Jason from Geek Life [01:20:00] Radio via geekliferadio.com, Garrett Seigel, Level Up Financial Planning via www.levelupfinancialplanning.com, Magnus from Yes Web via yesweb.se, Syntaxify from the HTML All The Things Discord server, and Stacy Mosler from the website swoonworthydesigns.com. And remember that we also have a contributing author. That is Michael LaRocca. He's a contributing author on HTML All The Things website, but he's also the author of Self-Taught: The X Generation Blog at selftaughttxg.com. And if you want to learn how to code, take some courses in some front end, back end, and some other things, and use their interactive media player code editor where you can pause the lesson, break the code, play with it live, press play, and the lesson just picks up right where it was before.

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