A
shill is someone who engages in covert advertising, pushing a product they have
a personal or professional interest in.
A
“CMS shill” is a name I have coined to describe someone and something I see a
lot of in my day-to-day work: designers, SEOs and others who can’t program
indiscriminately push a CMS (a piece of web software that runs your site and
allows you to manage its contents) regardless of clients’ requirements.
Without
getting too sidetracked, CMSs come in all sorts of shapes and sizes but for the
purpose of this blog I will refer to three types:
1.
Pre-developed CMS/framework. A piece of
software already developed. You pay someone to install it and customise it to
your needs. There are scores of these available; most are free though some do
incur a one-off cost but it’s rarely expensive.
2.
Hosted solution. These are almost always
commercial and you pay a recurring fee for the company that owns it to host if
for you. Some of these are designed and built in-house by agencies.
3.
Bespoke site. A bespoke site is designed and
built to your needs. It will likely use existing pieces of software to speed up
development but on a more modular level. The end result will be something
unique to your needs.
So,
which is the right one for you—and which one is better?
The
point is they all have their own strengths and weaknesses and this is why it is
not a good idea to use a CMS shill as I will explain in more detail.
A
CMS shill will typically have a platform in mind before you tell them
your website requirements. I consider this to be extremely unprofessional and a
sign of poor workmanship. It’s both ignorant and selfish.
CMS
shills are ignorant
Often,
CMS shills recommend their platform of choice because they don’t know any
better. For example, I see a lot of SEOs use WordPress for everything. Although
it is beyond the scope of this blog, this ubiquitous CMS has an alarming amount
of drawbacks that only a developer can appreciate. The default range of functionality
is so narrow some developers even object to it being called a CMS—yet it is
used by default for thousands of websites.
This
is just one example; there is no CMS out there that does everything perfectly
so using the same one for everything guarantees you’ll only ever please some of
the people some of the time. Almost all non-developers I have come across that
are CMS shills have never tried anything else so their recommendations are
always made out of ignorance.
CMS
shills are selfish
Choosing
the same CMS for everything often suits the provider and not the client. I’ve
seen agencies that have some fine in-house CMSs but they aren’t always the
right tool for the right job. However, it’s more convenient and profitable for
them to use something that takes less time and they can host it in-house.
Likewise,
because some freelance designers know a particular CMS they will push it every
time as it would take them too long to learn something else—or they don’t want
to use a developer and sacrifice some of their profit.
Clients
can be CMS shills too
Sometimes
clients will ask you to use a CMS before they’ve briefed you on what they want.
Usually, it’s because they’ve heard its cheaper. I always suggest we decide
after some investigation. If they persist, however, I decline to quote. I
personally don’t do “cheap” jobs so I always turn these people down.
The
solution
Here
are my tips to avoid using a CMS shill:
1.
If someone is quick to recommend a CMS, ask them what
else they’ve considered.
2.
Always, always, always make sure a developer
(not a designer or SEO) has considered your requirements.
About
Tim Bennett
Tim Bennett
is a web designer and developer from Leeds, England. After graduating from
Leeds Metropolitan University with a First Class Honours Degree in Computing,
he went on to work in both private and public sectors. After developing all web
content for a small Internet Marketing agency in Yorkshire he went on to set up
his own company, Texelate, offering web design in leeds. For more information visit www.texelate.co.uk
or call +44 (0) 1274 621113.
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