Thread

It’s just the way I talk about it with clients. CMS’s are only recently becoming widely used and so most of the clients I encounter think in terms of pages e.g. a testimonials page or gallery page.

I bring them around to the idea of having different ‘types of content’ and explain that we can use those things like testimonials or a few of the latest gallery images in a margin or a footer of a page which may be displaying a news or blog article as its main content.

So the client now realises what is now possible, instead of limiting their thinking to one page which deals with only one type of content.

To you and I a content type is (mostly) synonymous with a Channel(and custom field group etc).
In the case of Testimonials, your custom fields may consist of: Title, Testimonial, Author, Company and Sector.

While this is easy in Expression Engine and possible in WordPress, in WP you can use any custom field in any Post entry, so from a clients point of view, the workflow and proper creation of a testimonial requires them to remember which custom fields to use.

Correct me if I’m wrong please guys, but when I think of WordPress I think of two basic types of entry, a page and a post.

This is eliminated in EE because a specific set of fields is presented to the content administrator.

grrramps said it earlier: Use what’s appropriate for the client.

If they need a blog and a bunch of pages (or even just 4 static pages), go for WP for sure! Any hint of ANYTHING that sounds remotely different, I smile and explain how our chosen CMS can do anything they can dream up, politely of course.

Four pages! I’d find some nice css templates and make the dang pages! No need to use a db, etc…..

Four pages! I’d find some nice css templates and make the dang pages! No need to use a db, etc…..

I am actually laughing out aloud at myself for that one. hahah

I’m just discovering EE but in the web agency I work for, we use WP a lot. We’ve done a little bit over 80 websites with this CMS in the last 2 years.

We personaly don’t sell websites but web-strategies to earn money. Website is only a part of it even if it’s the central one.

In most of the cases, our clients want an attractive website calling visitors to action (order, book, contact, react) bringing a growth leverage to their company.

With all the available themes, different pages templates, layouts, widgets and plugins available with WP we can answer 95% of our clients needs (small - medium companies). In some cases we make small customisations to adapt the look and feel to what it should be and in rare cases we code specific features. At the end, we can deliver a “nice” website” very fast and the final cost is about 10% of the amount we charge.

Last examples (these are french websites but not spam ):

- institut beaute thonon (10 hours from the order to the delivery)
- agence web haute savoie (our web-agency website - 23 hours)

I hope the learning curve won’t be too steep with EE. We want to compare it with Typo3 and Drupal (which we already use for more complex requests).

Another thing: EE is a little bit unknown in our country (France) and for some reasons, it counts (if you need to hire someone who use EE for example).

bottom line, sometimes the best thing you can do is to refuse a client.

Agreed. I rather not take it then to quit in the middle after you have done work on a project.