Ez or Bespoke Solution

Saturday 04 August 2007 1:23:53 pm

Hi:

I'm new to all this so please excuse me if I'm not making too much sense. We are setting up a web site which has a forum built in, this will be phpbb or vbulletin, their will also be an e-comerce site build in.

Now, the company we are choosing to do this have very good experience with web site, forum development and e-commerce, they also have a small team of SEO and e-marketing professionals and will develop eveything for a reasonable fee.

The issue for me is that the CMS area has a monthly ongoing management fee. I have questioned why they can not use something like ez publish they have said the following:

'our clients were always asking us to add features and functionality, with an off the shelf system it was nigh on impossible to add features. If you change the system to add new features, then update their next security fix it will basically undo all the work you did as a feature update. This is actually similar to the problem we face with the forum as things can't really be added as it is an off the shelf product. You lose the flexibility of customisation. The difference we decided with a forum was that a forum is a forum they all do the same job, and as long as the SEO is how we want it (which it is) and we can customise to a certain degree then we need not develop our own.
We also noticed that the off the shelf products although they were what we needed with regards to updating a website they didn't allow us to achieve what we wanted with regards to search engine optimisation. We spent alot of time and research looking into the best way to setup SEO for our clients but unfortunately every CMS we looked at didn't offer us the flexibility or the ability to easily modify the system to offer the best for our clients.
Another reason which made us shun an off the shelf system was because although they offered a good CMS solution we were then required to look for an e-commerce solution that would look like it was part of the same system. We have yet to see one that offered the whole package that would function how we wanted it to for our clients and would allow us to modify not only the CMS side of things but also the E-commerce side of things.'

O.K, so is the above correct or am I being led down the garden path? Any help for someone in the know would be most helpful

Saturday 04 August 2007 3:11:52 pm

I would recommend choosing applications which best meet the requirements - even if that means more than one application.

A carefully designed site architecture can integrate several applications seamlessly - and give you state-of-the-art functionality in all areas.

My only caution is in the area of user registration. You may need a unified user management system. The same is true for search, although many search engines offer services at the site level.