What do you look for in a CMS? At WSI in Holmfirth we’ve tested a huge range over the years. Some of them impressed us, some of them were never spoken of again! We’ve used all of the systems available inside the WSI marketplace and a lot of popular open-source alternatives, but we’ve never found that perfect mix of features, flexibility and simplicity.

Help us to build your dream CMS! We’re working on our own system and we’d like to make it available for all of you to offer to your clients. What do you love or hate about existing systems? What’s the one feature that you’ve always wanted? Let us know and we’ll do our best to make it happen.<!–more–>

Why not use an existing CMS?

Using an off-the-shelf CMS has many advantages; they usually allow you to deploy a site quickly at low cost. Many of them also have an active development community, meaning you have access to custom “modules” and additional functionality. The trade-off is that all of this comes at the expense of flexibility and usability. You no longer have the same level of control over your site’s processes and appearance as you would with a bespoke build.

Our aim is to build a system which allows us to create a bespoke quality site, with the cost and delivery time of an off-the-shelf product.

Building Our Own CMS In-House

Our in-house designers and developers created our first system from the ground up about 18 months ago. It was basic but was built on the principles of speed, security and simplicity for the user. These fundamentals have been paramount since then as we’ve built in features and slowly increased the systems capabilities.

When we make the system available to other ICs we’re hoping to have the following features available as standard:

• Simple page management for single or multi nav sites
• Flawless SEO friendly URLs
• Advanced visitor reporting/statistics built into the back-office
• A customisable live feed of activity on your site
• News, event, user, banner and bulk email management
• Automatic HTML and XML sitemap generation

We’ve spent a lot of time ensuring that the user interface for the back-office is as clean and easy to use as possible. Here’s a quick preview of the current build:

We’re going to continue getting our system ready and want it to be as useful for you as it has been for us. Tell us what you like or dislike the most about the systems you are using at the moment. Tell us what your dream feature would be. What’s the one thing that your last client asked for that you weren’t able to deliver?

We want to hear it all no matter how big or small the feature! Leave a comment below or email dan@wsiyorkshire.co.uk directly.