Now that that’s all installed, you have to go out and search for modules that support your clients needs and then you have to implement a theme. Of course you could go and grab a theme off the shelf, but do you really want to hand off a site with a theme that 100s of others have used. Either you create a custom theme (no small feat I may add) or tweak an existing one (easier but still a task).

Then you have to “manage the code”. A new release or update, you now have to go and update 15 wordpress accounts, 20 Drupal systems, all the while being aware that the modules you used have not been updated yet. And that’s just one site. ughh. I don’t even want to think about it. All this time spent “managing code” when you could be busting out 3-4 new designs for new clients, moving forward.

Plus, the pains my clients have had in the past with custom broken, unsupported CMS’s, $99 bucks a month for something they can simply update and manage themselves is a bargain.

But I’d suggest some more basic features like a calendaring module, newsletter feature, ability to send newsletters by email (Listserve), etc.

Thanks for joining in. I see what you are saying and I hope I can make a distinction between the other solutions you mentioned.

On the web hosting plans you mentioned…it’s that it’s not just the website that is hosted….it’s the whole tool, end-to-end. So, you build your site, preview (and share the preview with customers), and do the CMS, SEO, and all the forms and the associated database/data are hosted as well…all within the platform. And the managed, cloud hosting environment provides a whole host of benefits vs. the traditional hosting model.

The tools you mentioned (WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal), while great for content management, lack in the area of creating pixel-perfect websites. If you want to create a pixel perfect site, you typically would create a site exactly how you want it, then either integrate a CMS on the backend (big bucks), or have service contract with the design firm for the maintenance. The other option is to use a CMS from the beginning (using the CMS environment), but then you lose the control of the pixel perfection. So, it comes down to a conundrum where you have to decide whether to build a custom site ground up and then integrate a CMS, or build the site on the CMS and sacrifice some of the control of the look and feel. That is one of the fundamental things Sitemasher tries to solve by having pixel perfect design (drag-and-drop, Visual CSS, etc,.) combined with a really rich, role based, CMS. Since Sitemasher is aimed at professional web designers, the idea is to allow them to create pixel perfect designs while still allowing the content management to be easy (either for the designer or the customer).

With the pricing, it’s a lot more about TCO when you look at how much it costs to build the site, manage the content and site updates, perform the SEO, etc.

Looking forward to more feedback.

I recently had a client specifically ream me because I had built our 18-month contract with low front-end costs and high (to their minds) monthly maintenance costs. Ouch! And this for a complete web development project that cost them under $20K total.

So, I would not be comfortable selling a client a $100/month website package when apparently comparable shared hosting plans are available from $5-$30 per month, from providers like site5.com and pair.com and a slew of others.

The benefits outlined by Nicole don’t set Sitemasher apart from their free and low-cost competitors like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, along with the plugins that are developed and maintained by independent developers.

I am not saying there’s not a good value proposition hidden somewhere in Sitemasher, just that neither Nicole nor Aliza is putting it where I can see it.

The biggest differentiator from traditional solutions is probably the integrated builder/CMS in environment. Most content management systems need to be mapped to the website, which requires integration and upfront costs as well as the maintenance fee to remap the CMS when the site changes (regardless of whether the CMS hosted or not). Sitemasher’s CMS is totally integrated to the website building environment, so movement between the builder and CMS is imperceptible, only differentiated by user rights (for example, you can assign design rights to only the designer, and assign the ability the change content to a marketing person within the same tool). So, if you create a new page, you can dole out responsibility to content managers to create or change content on that page (with rights restrictions, of course). Because it is all hosted (the tool as well as the site), the collaboration is really rich, as there is not a bunch of emailing mockups, pdfs, site changes, etc…back and forth.

On the website building, I agree that Visual Studio is a powerful visual programming tool (and there are a lot of other programming/ website building options out there, many of them free). At the end of the day, it’s still a programming tool (with Sitemasher, you don’t program), and you still need to also solve the CMS, the hosting, the Analytics, the SEO, etc. It’s all integrated so there is not a bunch of coding and knitware to construct a website.

On the SEO,to begin with, Sitemasher leverages some best practices to help build SEO-friendly sites with its code output and the site infrastructure And, yes, Sitemasher auto-generates meta tags within the pages, updates Google sitemaps and urllist.txt when new pages are added (so it has built-in generators that do not have to be installed by website owner), it also auto generates robots.txt, info.txt and more elements. Also, Sitemasher has a SEO simple editor which exposed SEO tools that help the non-techie tweak, further optimize their site and give them full control of optimizing (we’ve exposed page redirects, advanced metas, sitemap.xml, url.list and permalinks into a text editor that would normally need a coder to access the different files on the server and use specific coding for each element to help with seo) so no need to hire a webmaster/coder to implement  SEO tweaks –  the website owner can implement or hand over to SEO firm (cuts out the middle man).

On analytics, we wanted to provide some internal analytics that are site specific (ie. time spent on site) and basic site stats that are probably enough for most businesses so the owner can have it real time within the platform and/or over a mobile device. But Sitemasher integrates with other packages such as Google Analytics and advanced analytics packages as well.

Hope this makes sense! Thanks again for your post.

I think the clue is the phrase “Developer Edition” – which points out the folly of most of the tools in use right now…they are never a single solution, they generally require a high degree of programming skill and they do not include hosting and management.

A service that incorporates all of that is definitely worth it to an individual that just wants the job done simply and easily. The key, as we have found here in Finland, is everything 100% online…it makes everyones life easier…

A really powerful site builder: Microsoft Visual Studio Web Developer Edition – Free

Detailed analytics – Free (as you mention google analytics)

Basic SEO – TBH I don’t really understand what that means! Do they populate your Metatags for you? Do they reformat your content to make it read better in a search engine? Or are they just submiting your sitemaps to Google/Yahoo etc.? Which can be done for free.

What non-hosted “Simple CMS” costs $1200/year? Graffiti CMS costs $99. I say non-hosted because you can’t really compare it to hosted if you are then going to take into account the costs of hosting.

And managed hosting you probably got about right.