The Overlooked Soft Costs of Your CMS Choice
Life is busy. Work can be even busier. So it’s understandable that we often default to making choices based on hard costs which are quick and easy to calculate. The downside to this is that we overlook the soft costs associated with our decisions. And if you only have one data point, your own website for instance, it’s even more difficult to assess potential soft costs because you simply don’t have many (or any) comparisons for reference. On the other hand, with transparency and communication, it’s possible to collect more data points. Over time you can start to see trends toward minimizing soft costs even when it’s challenging to quantify them.
About three years ago we started to narrow down the content management systems we use (Wordpress, Magento, Umbraco) and we started providing clients with detailed demonstrations of each system’s capabilities within its interface. The efficiency with which you operate within the CMS interface directly affects the soft costs of maintaining a website. The launch of a website is just the beginning. On-going maintenance and content governance is critical to achieving your business goals. Therefore, choosing a CMS and becoming comfortable with editing, revising, and updating it is vitally important.
Over the last 18 months, our clients have overwhelmingly chosen Umbraco compared to other CMS options. We’re still fans of the other open-source CMS platforms, but collective wisdom has been pointing to Umbraco as a significant cost saver when it comes to three considerations in particular:
- Efficiency of managing website content and settings
- Efficiency of not having to deal with (fix) incompatible plugins and resource conflicts
- Efficiency of not being as vulnerable to hacks, malware, or other security breaches
Here’s why:
- Umbraco’s admin is organized very well
- Items are intuitively and intentionally located
- Settings are centrally located rather than separated in multiple admin locations
- It has a true global search (as opposed to others where search is actually limited)
- It has a clean, unified, and somewhat minimal administrative experience.
If you are curious to learn more or would like to see a demo, please feel free to contact us. We’d love to hear from you.