Today, I am at the blogINDIANA conference learning about different blogging topics and also promoting our product, Marketpath CMS. It's interesting, even now, how many home-grown web content management systems there are. We knew this when we began building our product. We knew that home-grown CMS's would be our largest competitors.
One benefit of the home-grown CMS is that the relationship to the developer, the company who built it, is very personal. It has tremendous value because the customer is working with a vendor they trust.
The disadvantages of the home-grown CMS are in system maturity, features and benefits. Every home-grown CMS I've seen is immature. It lacks the full-scale development and quality assurance required to deliver a quality product from which end users derive their return on investment. Additionally, most larger changes (like adding a new page) require intervention from the original developer. Keep your fingers crossed they are not on vacation or too busy on another large project to assist for another 6 weeks. Believe it or not, that happens a lot.
What we are recommending is that instead of trying to build a home-grown application that is limited in functionality, become a reseller of a mature web content management system. We have a program in place that allows resellers to make a nice return on every new customer. And the return is recurring every year. They get the benefit of a mature content management system that is always growing in features and benefits, and offers the expertise of the vendor behind it. Do it right, go with a pro.
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