So you want to create your own CMS

A CMS is an easy to be used tool for non computer savvy users to manage a website. There are so many CMSs out there which do what they are supposed to do very efficiently because there are great teams of developers to support them. Furthermore, many of these systems are free. What interests me though is not which CMS is the best one but why companies keep developing their owns.

Reason #1: doing certain things with your own CMS

The “lifestyle” of small companies is limited. Customer X wants a website for the company he owns, customer Y wants to develop a personal project and customer Z to support an investment. What do companies do in such cases? They build their own CMS in order to come up to the expectations. The question is why a Web development company decides to take this path instead of using an already developed CMS? I think there are two main reasons:

• A company cannot control an external CMS. What I mean is that it is not easy to trust other people to cover your own needs.
• There isn’t any CMS which can do everything. As the needs grow a single CMS can’t cope with them.

Both reasons seem quite fair to me. However there’s an objection I need to make. Any platform, any tool needs to be supported in a regular basis by people who know it well. This is why I believe that well known CMSs will always be better than the ones developed by a team of people under a small company. It’s utopia to believe your own CMS would serve you better forever than one which is supported by hundreds of users and developers.

I do believe in open communities of developers and I do think that in the near future we are going to use far more powerful systems than the ones we have now. To add some more salt into the wound I ‘d be much happier with a team of people who can use a lot of different CMSs the way a chameleon changes its colors. This is what I call adaptability, knowledge and power.

Reason #2: marketing

Marketing, the laws of industry, hooking clients etc. are all empty words to me as long as we use them without knowing what they really mean. However, all this emptiness can be a reason for developing your own CMS.

So there’s this clever dick who thinks: “If I convince my clients to use my own CMS they will stay forever with me. It will be very difficult for them to use this system without me.”

Instead of trying to develop a good product, to help a client achieve what he needs to, to provide a solid solution and to support efficiently, this guy messes things up. In this scenario it is most probable to end up with an unhappy customer who won’t trust easily a similar company in the future. Is this business wise?

In other words we reach to a situation where one develops a product in order to trap a client. I know this thought hides a lot of in between steps, but the meaning remains the same. I am not a specialist but I am pretty sure this is all wrong.

To conclude, often a new CMS isn’t always a new tool which can make the life of people easy. It works the same way as when someone who owns some money becomes a CEO. It takes more than just a roll of the dice to do that.