We’ve spent many years trying to find the best content management system to provide the most flexible, bespoke and user-friendly solution for our clients. After mainly working with ProcessWire and WordPress we became increasingly dissatisfied with the customisation, security and flexibility so set about exploring new options. We discovered Craft CMS and haven’t looked back! Two years on we have built a portfolio of Craft sites and are proud to be a Craft CMS partner.
WordPress is very popular and powers roughly 25% of websites across the globe (according to statistics). Most people have heard of it or used it, it has a vast number of plugins, themes and it's completely free! Over the years, we've worked with other content management systems like Joomla, ProcessWire, Drupal, Umbraco, and Episerver. All of them have their pros and cons, but nothing has compared to the flexibility and freedom of Craft.
We've summarised below some of (but not all) the things we love about Craft.
There aren't any themes for Craft, so rest assured your website isn't a £50 template purchased online. We develop Craft websites from the ground up, which means that your site is 100% bespoke and customised in terms of design and functionality.
Many CMS admin interfaces are clunky, and not user friendly. This can be a major concern for clients as they sometimes need a lot training on how to use the CMS. Because we develop Craft websites from the ground up, it means we can customise the admin interface completely to your needs.
This means you'll only see the necessary information, keeping the admin clean, simple and easy for you to manage and update.
The people over at Craft take platform security and stability extremely seriously and ensure any bugs are rapidly fixed in their update cycle. In the unlikely instance of a security related bug, Craft can get the fix deployed quickly to their users with Craft's one-click auto-updating.
You can find out more about Craft CMS security here
Out of all the 'Live Preview' features available in any of the CMSs we've used, Craft's is by far the best.
In WordPress there is a preview button, but it opens the draft in a new tab in the browser. With Craft, the user can view the admin console and website in the browser side by side and see the data change and update in real time (minor 1–2 second delay) when updating/editing a field.
Users can also share the draft content with other team members by using a sharable preview URL. This helps with signing content off before pushing it to the live website.
The Craft interface is arranged in blocks, which means the client admin can take a completely blank page and add predefined blocks (which we build) to build up what they need on any given page.
As developers, we have complete control of what blocks we define which allows flexibility for almost anything! Clients can then easily control the order of the content on the page, whilst maintaining the design of the website.
If a new block is needed, we can easily add this with far less effort than redesigning and rebuilding an entire webpage. This new block is then available to use on any other page, meaning there is no double development/integration.
When it comes to flexibility and scalability, Craft is king!
Because Craft websites are built 'from the ground up', it makes no assumptions about what kind of content your site needs.
This gives us the flexibility and freedom to create different content types (sections) that are completely related to the needs of your content, rather than forcing the content into predefined groups.
Because each section is 100% bespoke, it gives us the ability to create relationships between different ports of data, linking posts and pages together easily and seamlessly.
Craft therefore solves one of the biggest bug-bears about WordPress (and other CMSs) – its lack of relationships between post types.
If you would like to explore the option of creating a website within Craft CMS or looking to move away from WordPress, get in touch.