How to sell Craft CMS to your team

The problem with WordPress is that it was made for blogging and wily designers began to create themes that transitioned WordPress into a platform that businesses could build their website on, whether it was intuitive for their audience or not.

Similarly to WordPress, Craft is an open-source CMS but it’s flexible, user-friendly and developed for creating custom digital experiences. That alone is one of its biggest strengths and selling points.

Pre-designed templates aren’t one size fits all. Every business’s audience is unique, with its own goals and pain points and needs. Customer experience should be everything and at the forefront of any web owner and brand’s mind. Happy customers mean conversion.

Craft gives teams the flexibility to create experiences specific to a user and the journey they need to undertake to make a decision. When it comes to creating personas for website users, every designer worth their salt makes a point of not basing decisions on assumptions, and it’s the same when it comes to user journeys and content—Craft empowers its developers and content managers with the versatility to develop websites from the ground up. That means that everything can be bespoke and speak to users on a personal and intuitive level; forget pre-designed templates and create experiences.

Many businesses face the same problem—they don’t have the requirement for a full-time developer, but they do need development resources in order to build out their website, ensure maintenance is undertaken, and troubleshoot issues that arise.

Maintenance and troubleshooting are a given for running a website — that’s what retainers are for — the beauty of Craft is that it can be designed and built based on components. That means that each page that is designed is built up of components that are often used across various pages on a website. That allows content managers to create pages without any need for more development with large sections of the website being largely cms’able (bar the obvious, such as the footer).

Having content managed websites on Magento, Shopify, WordPress and Craft (CMS and Commerce) I can honestly say, Craft is not only the easiest CMS to use as a backend content manager but also the most intuitive. That’s something, as a Craft Partner, we’ve taken very seriously—ensuring that content managers can navigate the backend of Craft with ease, with intelligent relationships and user-friendly management. It’s easy to learn and simple to use and as part of every Craft project we undertake, we always bake in Craft training so our clients are educated on using their new CMS.

You’ll save more time in the long run with a straightforward and manageable CMS, than the headache that other popular platforms cause.

Plugins shouldn’t be a selling point. Sure, they’re convenient and they provide opportunities to bolt on more functionality, however, more plugins pose greater risks: security breaches, bad optimisation, slow page load speeds, and more frequent updates. It’s less about what more can we add to a website and rather, what does the user need?

Craft has plenty of plugins, despite what other CMS platforms would lead you to believe; it has an entire store dedicated to them. We have our favourites for the CMS and for the Commerce side of things and we take great care in ensuring the plugins we use have dedicated developers that keep their plugins up to date and secure.

We hear ya—it’s a big step to build a new website and they’re not cheap. The important thing to look at when it comes to a website is the investment, especially now. The market has accelerated online over the last two years for obvious reasons and customer expectation has increased exponentially too.

These days, you get what you pay for; expertise, quality of output, confidence in your decision, and a supportive extension of your team that has the best interests of your business at heart. That’s not suggesting that a low cost means bad quality but it often doesn’t compare to the added value that comes with the process of designing and building a tailor-made website for your business, brand, user and team.

It’s about scalability and futureproofing one of your biggest assets. We’ve seen it so many times. The low-cost option seems the most viable but in the long run, it’s the higher-priced option when improvements aren’t reflective of the cost. In the end, most businesses end up redesigning and developing their website all over again.

There’s so much that Craft is capable of doing and it’s scalable which offers flexibility as a business grows. It’s no secret we’re big advocates of Craft but we’ve got years of experience with multiple different CMS and ecommerce platforms, and we’ve had plenty of problems, headaches and inconveniences from most of them to know that Craft is our future when it comes to web development and ensuring our clients have the best experience and platform to run their business from online.

If you’re interested in knowing more about Craft, would like a demo or have a Craft website you’re not currently getting along with, get in touch and we’d be happy to discuss how we can help.