Building a CMS In-House: A Train Story

Now, this could refer to your own IT team working with a web designer, or a design company on their own. But what it boils down to is an effective, efficient design firm will use time-saving tools and solutions to get the job done. They will leverage existing technologies rather than building everything from the ground up.

There are many benefits to utilizing open source or commercial tools in web design. We’ll use the content management system as an example. It’s common for large enterprises to want to build everything themselves, and that feeling is natural: they have the talent and the resources, and they want their own name on their products. This sentiment often goes all the way down to the inner workings of their website.

Plenty of web design and development shops build custom content management systems. Some of them are very good. But they all suffer from the same problem: they’re custom. Want to add a new technical feature to your site? Get out your checkbook, because it’s got to be written for your CMS. Want to make changes to the site template? Start clocking those billable hours.

Think back to the railroad boom in the 19th century. Each rail company used their own gauge of tracks, ensuring that only their trains could run on their rails. If you didn’t own the tracks that went through a particular city, you were either shut out or you had to build your own infrastructure. In the end, the biggest company won because they adopted a standard.

Fast forward to the present: your web design project is akin to building your own railroad. You have the choice of adopting a standard (either an open source or commercial CMS) or building your own rails (building a CMS in-house). You may have your own reasons for wanting a custom CMS, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

But a CMS–especially open source–that’s “out of the box” will generally be more extensible via plug-ins and widgets, be cheaper and faster to deploy, support more choices of templates, and won’t require extensive programming to add new features. Even better, by choosing an out-of-the-box solution, the workings of the CMS are standard. So when you add new members to your team who are in charge of making web updates, chances are they won’t require much if any training.