Thread

Normally, I don’t find the CMS platform the #1 selling point for our projects. However, there are some clients for which the hurdles for choosing our firm boil down to these issues:

1) I haven’t heard of EE
2) EE seems expensive
3) EE isn’t open-source

Those familiar concerns can be addressed successfully, depending on the individuals involved on the client’s end.

But sometimes EE can be overruled simply because an IT manager up the ladder blocks the selection of EE simply because of the 3 points above.

Opening this up to the community, what successes (or constructive failures) do you have to share in light of these objections?

Opening this up to the community, what successes (or constructive failures) do you have to share in light of these objections?

As you have noticed, it most cases it is up to the web developer or agency to sell the cms to the client. If we can do a good job of that, then we can win projects. If we can’t sell EE, then either we will be persuaded to use competing products (if we or our agency is willing to do so), or lose the job.

From my perspective, Ellis Lab has made it more difficult for me as freelancer, or the agency I contract to, to make the sell, as the website no longer offers the sort of information I need to convince a corporate CTO who most likely is versed in Microsoft-speak, and packages that run well on IIS.

I had a major success last year selling a mid-sized hospital on EE, and had to convince the CTO that our agency could run the Red Hat server I spec’d out (instead of their preferred IIS server), and that EE was a “pro” tool that could do everything they needed. It was a win over a poorly constructed site on a proprietary cms, with bad design that they could have deployed. The CTO spent some time perusing the EE website, and looking over support forums, User Guide and who knows what else before signing on. They ditched $35k of never-deployed work for the solutions we sold them.

Many people will say choose the tool that will do the job, and know how to sell that tool. Along with that, I’d add that the value-added skills a freelancer or an agency brings can go far to making the sell. Having a good designer on staff is key, as the looks of the design can sell a project to some clients, instead of the cms’ specs or reputation. There’s a dozen ways that a site can be sold without having to have good public info about a product, but it sure helps when the software vendor is in your corner, in a public way.

Right now I’m competing for a project for a county government looking to either further develop a WP site for a big granted health dept. project, or ditch it for a custom EE solution (does this project qualify for Core? Good question that the website doesn’t clearly answer). Not only am I competing against the original WP developer, our agency is working with another agency on this project (the website is but one aspect of much larger project) that has a WP developer. So I’ve got internal competition against their WP developer. So I’m having to rely on my experience to make the sell, as I’ll get no real assistance from the EL website.

Personal experience is probably your best asset making an EE sell to a client. The days of the client coming to the forum and asking “will this solution work for me” are over, as far as an EL person assisting. And we have no control over what sort of sell a client might get if they pick up the phone and call, or email EE sales. I’ve read some horror stories on the forum about what can happen.

What would work best would be for EL to at least let a customer sales rep run around the forums once in a while answering basic sales pitch questions, and not letting negative statements about EE that are beginning to fill the forums chase potential clients away. Either EL will begin to interact with their forums to some degree, or they’ll nuke them once they discover that they are working against sales.

This is a great thread you started.  Goes to the heart of some very serious issues.

Selling a CMS is a bad road, unless your business is making the CMS.  I tell clients any design can be implemented on any good CMS.  I tell them I will build their site on any CMS they want.  If they have no clue, I use EE for prototyping page definition and navigation, then implement on WordPress, because it gives them the most support options once my gig is complete.  Naturally, I work to get the support work after initial development, but it is not fair to the client to put them in a corner where they have no choice but me.

My best EE client searched for months before finding me.  They could not find anyone local with EE experience and savvy to work on their existing site.  That is great for me, but how can I in good conscience recommend a client start down that road if they are not on it already?

I love EE and hate WordPress.  When I am the customer, I use EE for my web work.

EE is a finely engineered CMS, built atop CodeIgniter, which is one of the most elegant, awesome packages I ever saw, perfect for serious development.  WordPress is an overgrown fad, practically a virus, distorted from its original simple idea, into a pain in the butt standard, used for way too many things.  WordPress always has you doing nonsensical things that no one would ever think to try, except for the arcane instructions you are forced to search to make it do anything. 

Unfortunately, there are way too many WordPress zombies who have made it the standard.  WordPress is like Microsoft products, that you are stuck using because that is where the money has flowed ahead of us. 

We all know the best technology is not always the most economically viable.  I think that is the situation with EE today.

Another killer EE problem:  rich text editing.  WordPress does it nice.  The problem with WordPress is the front end is an Edsel.  Should have been killed long ago.  EE has a perfect solution for CMS backend, because of the structure of channels, channel fields, templates, etc.  Front end technology can advance to any level, the EE backend always will work.  WP forces you to use their front end structure.  Maybe if I can ever learn to understand it, I will appreciate it, but for now, I have a hard time seeing how WP can expect to provide the best front end application architecture, given the limitations of its backend Posts/Pages/Categories.  In other words, WP is a pain, but we are stuck recommending it because of its market share.  EE is awesome, but I cannot recommend it in good conscience, because of lack of market share.

Dan,

You bring up some good points!

I don’t agree with you that EE can’t be recommended “in good conscience,” mainly because we’ve recommended EE dozens (hundreds?) of times, not once regretting that decision. A CMS that has a proven track record and a legitimate argument for being the best tool for the job isn’t hard to recommend. I do get your point about market share, but I don’t find that to be a struggle while presenting to clients. (it’s easy to present devot-ee, show-ee and director-ee to paint a picture of the EE community)

The Open Source issue has some interesting nuances, because many clients, while they may have a LAMP host, have Microsoft tools as the backbone of their company: Exchange, Sharepoint, Outlook, etc.

Why is commercial software “OK” for an office network, but somehow bad for a CMS platform?

creativearc, Thank you for replying with such thoughtful excellent comments.  You said things better than I did.

The market share problem in Houston is that clients like local support, while the EE community is geographically dispersed.  Maybe if we got an EE community going in Houston… hummm….

Now you got me thinking.  😊

EE is easy to sell against WP if presented in the right light.  WP just had a major hack across all networks recently.  Best to get a list of past WP issues, including the fact that every time they upgrade, normally whenever the wind blows lol, it kills plugins and themes.  So while customers struggle to decide between a 2 hour install on WP, over the long haul of EE they will pay a lot more.  We EE developers & designers need some serious case studies against open source.  Nothing against open source but most of these systems are in a state of constant confusion, no wonder you cannot sell EE to most customers, systems like WP seem so free and easy, nothing could be further from the truth.  Good news is I recently got a customer to come over to EE and they could not believe the flexibility and scalability.  So now they are looking to build everything in EE.  So put together some compare videos and soon all your clients will see the light.  I have to say since the change in the site here, EE is watered down through to much noise, still there but keep it simple guys.  I could do a better job of selling it, no offense but remember they are coders not salespeeps 😊

I think this is the best time the EE developers and creators must explain in deep details the PROS and CONS
of EE vs WordPress.

This is really a very nice thread on why we beginners should choose EE over WordPress.

@creativearc

1) I haven’t heard of EE
...clients have generally not heard of the 100’s of other CMS’s out there. The one that gets the most press isn’t always the best fit, General Motors is a household name for cars but there are many other car manufacturers who build far better cars.

2) EE seems expensive
...it seems expensive until you add up the hours it takes to make XYZ CMS into doing what you want it to do. You have to remember that EE can do most stuff out of the box where other CMS’s need a ton of custom coding and plugins to even even simple things… typical example try getting Wordpress to display category images and category custom fields… easy in EE, very hard in WP.

3) EE isn’t open-source
... but it is Open Source, EE’s built on Codeigniter which is an Open Source product and you have full access to all system files to do what you want with. Don’t confuse “Open source” with “Free software”, the two definitions are regularly misinterpreted.

@whygod

EE and Wordpress are like chalk and cheese. Wordpress is a “post” based system (based on it’s blog nature), whereas EE is a “content” based system, therefore WP isn’t really a true CMS at all, rather a P(ost)MS!

EE can do most things out of the box, stuff which WP needs plugins or custom PHP work to get done, and because of that it’s a lot quicker to develop sites with.

This is a great thread you started.  Goes to the heart of some very serious issues.

Selling a CMS is a bad road, unless your business is making the CMS.  I tell clients any design can be implemented on any good CMS.  I tell them I will build their site on any CMS they want.  If they have no clue, I use EE for prototyping page definition and navigation, then implement on WordPress, because it gives them the most support options once my gig is complete.  Naturally, I work to get the support work after initial development, but it is not fair to the client to put them in a corner where they have no choice but me.

Which is nearly always what happens after a paying client—someone like me—ends up with EE.  @DanAllen is the only guy in this thread who is thinking about what happens to a business owner “stuck” with EE.  Because it has nothing to do with “finding someone local,” as this is discussed later in this thread; it’s about finding anyone that is remotely affordable, period. 

My best EE client searched for months before finding me.  They could not find anyone local with EE experience and savvy to work on their existing site.  That is great for me, but how can I in good conscience recommend a client start down that road if they are not on it already?

I love EE and hate WordPress.  When I am the customer, I use EE for my web work.

EE is a finely engineered CMS, built atop CodeIgniter, which is one of the most elegant, awesome packages I ever saw, perfect for serious development.  WordPress is an overgrown fad, practically a virus, distorted from its original simple idea, into a pain in the butt standard, used for way too many things.  WordPress always has you doing nonsensical things that no one would ever think to try, except for the arcane instructions you are forced to search to make it do anything. 

Unfortunately, there are way too many WordPress zombies who have made it the standard.  WordPress is like Microsoft products, that you are stuck using because that is where the money has flowed ahead of us. 

We all know the best technology is not always the most economically viable.  I think that is the situation with EE today.

I loathe WP as well, but I spend a lot of time wishing it could support my site.  I wrote my own original site from Boyink’s Toots/Book.  When time came to update to 2.0, I decided that the site needed a major “refreshing,” in terms of design, along with the update.  I won’t tell you what it’s been like, to find someone I can afford and who will actually do the work.  You guys think it’s fun to try to rummage around on the internet and find an EE developer?  Sure, if you have $10K in your pocket and no better way to spend it, you can find an EE person.  Or even, for “small” projects, a ready $2500+.  But not one of you thinks about what happens if your EE developer decides to go do something else, or goes out of business (3 different companies I contacted, two of which I used) or just disappears for over a month (1). 

I’m sure as web developers you all find it quite “great” to have “locked-in” clients, but I can tell you, in hindsight, I would have rather have spent a LOT more upfront for a “real” CMS (sorry:  EE is not a CMS any more than WP is, for different reasons) that would allow me to use the benefits of commercial competition to find a web developer when I need one.  What it costs $1500 to do on EE it costs 1/3rd to do on WP or Joomla, etc. From my perspective, that means that either a) it takes 3 times as long to do on EE, which means:  what’s the advantage to me, exactly?, or b) it’s expensive because that’s what the market will bear, because there are 1/100th of the web developers available for EE, and since you are all accustomed to doing $15K+ sites, you don’t stop to think about the small businessperson. 

Right now, I’m looking for a digital products cart/delivery system.  And of course, there are only a few solutions.  And of course, it’s going to be 5x the price of a DP Cart on any other system. 

What EE does do is allow web-developers to create quasi-custom sites, that are really reworks of the same templates over and over (don’t believe me?  Check out the EE site showroom) with new design atop.  You can then sell those sites to clients.  It has a tagging system that means you don’t need to know or write PHP.  That’s it.  To me, a “CMS” really does do everything out of the box—it doesn’t require 50 addons or modules or plug-ins to make it work.  And speaking as a business owner—not a web developer—being “stuck” with EE isn’t all that “cool.”

We think it’s better to bring a perspective client to our website and talk about our experience with EE, and provide our take on what matters us, why we continue to choose this product over others, rather then send them on a fishing expedition over here at EllisLab.

Our target client-base will likely find the EllisLab website pretty confusing (I still do), so I prefer to provide them with what they are looking for on our website.

Some content from our site:

ExpressionEngine is open-architecture commercial software built on a foundation of open-source technologies. It’s built using the CodeIgniter open-source application framework, uses the open-source language of PHP and runs on the open-source MySQL database.

ExpressionEngine attracts a highly talented international team of developers that support it and make a living ensuring the quality and advancement of EE. The modest software licensing fees, and optional support fees, fund ongoing software development and a professional software support team that work directly with EE’s developers. ExpressionEngine is also used to power a steadily growing percentage of the world’s top 10,000 websites.

http://netraising.com/web-development/software/

The above excerpt is written for our target audience, and our target isn’t web geeks or seasoned IT network geeks or grammer geeks, so it might not work for your audience. My point is that you should provide something that does, something that speaks to your audience,on your website.

Anticipate your client’s needs from the moment they are introduced to you/your company/your brand, until the moment when they can introduce you to your next client.

Our clients should be shopping for a relationship with us, not for software, and not for someone to set up the software they just purchased. We need to frame the conversation about what we bring to the relationship, and why we’re the person they want to be working with over the life of the website.

We can’t expect our perspective client’s to be asking the right questions, or to be focused on the right outcomes, that’s our role.

What we can do is educate and guide the conversation so that the measurable outcomes that start out as “does the software do this?” become, “will a relationship with this person save me grief/time/money?”.

This is how it works for us, at our shop.

I should add that if a perspective client, no matter how ultimately cool they’re organization would be to have on our client list, is stuck on what software to use, then we walk away. If a perspective client isn’t ready to listen to our advice and counsel at the beginning of a relationship, then that’s our signal that this isn’t going to be a good client for us.

What it costs $1500 to do on EE it costs 1/3rd to do on WP or Joomla, etc. From my perspective, that means that either a) it takes 3 times as long to do on EE, which means:  what’s the advantage to me, exactly?, or b) it’s expensive because that’s what the market will bear, because there are 1/100th of the web developers available for EE, and since you are all accustomed to doing $15K+ sites, you don’t stop to think about the small businessperson

Or, have you considered c) there are 50 amateur script kiddies out their for every one seasoned EE web developer professional that are willing to charge Walmart prices for a substandard product?

That’s what I’m up against in my local community’s web development “competition.” Which is why I don’t compete against those folks for jobs. Small businesses can find tons of nickel and dime WP and Joomla hacks willing to outcompete the pros. But who really suffers is the small business that doesn’t get the advantages of working with pros who understand everything from logo and brand development to traditional marketing as wells as new media.

And what do young Joomla or WP afficionados really know about the breadth of content creation and development in a wide variety of different businesses? What I find is that the knowledge of small businesses (and some mid sized businesses) about web development or CMS’s (and I’m not here to debate what is or isn’t a “CMS”) has become polluted by a web development industry inundated with inferior products and personnel. And those business owners deserve to be shown evidence of how an investment in a professional solution will give the a good ROI.

You want a professional solution? Hire a pro. Let the pro figure out the best technology to drive a business’s online presence and to coordinate it with offline media. And that doesn’t come cheap. An agency I contract to for web development charges the client the same for my services as it does for art and design work, logo and/or brand marketing, print and sign production, technical editing and layout, etc.

But when anyone can buy a $5/month hosting account with a free domain name and auto install Joomla or WP, and pay a kid $10/hour (or try to “hire” an unpaid intern to do it) to “build a website,” well it’s no different than complaining that a quality dinner out costs 5-10 times as much as a trip to McDonalds. You get what you pay for. And a web developer that either can fit into a larger agency team, or who brings a multitude of professional skills to a small business deserves to be paid a professional wage.

[/rant]

Wildrock that was spot on!  I have been in web dev for 16 full-time years, plus 2 part-time years paying my dues.  I find the same, it’s laughable, someone will tell me it takes them 2 hours to launch a WP site, well big deal I can do it in 5 minutes, that does not mean I want to or ever should.  So what is it that business are getting, well we know they are getting what they paid for, 98% of local business websites are a total fail, I know because I did my own study.  Those are the same business that had that kiddie put their site together for nickels.  Just like you said a pro can give deep insight and help that business succeed above its competition, but it’s not free, not cheap.  A pro can move faster, knows a ton more and obstacles do not take them 2 weeks to overcome, more like minutes to hours.  So in the long run open-source cost much more, oh by far.  First hand example, a business contacted me to do some Joomla work on their site.  I had no intention of doing the work and told them I was an EE website developer only, but they would not come off their ideals, yet it was costing them $30k a year to upgrade and maintain their main site.  The same could have been done with EE for around $15k a year, they were convinced otherwise.  It’s the mentality that everything on the web is cheap but we know it will cost them more in the long run.  So I build my own sites now, make them quality and beat them at their own business, a mere fact of a misguided community of business owners.

Now to how we can sell EE over WP or another type of OS CMS, it has to be a client that comes to the understanding and has weighed the costs on their own.  If they are to small of a company they will say let’s use WordPress or Joomla, it’s so easy to setup but by the time they realize it stinks, they are to locked and loaded into their decision.

Which is nearly always what happens after a paying client—someone like me—ends up with EE.  Because it has nothing to do with “finding someone local,” as this is discussed later in this thread; it’s about finding anyone that is remotely affordable, period. 

What EE does do is allow web-developers to create quasi-custom sites, that are really reworks of the same templates over and over (don’t believe me?  Check out the EE site showroom) with new design atop.  You can then sell those sites to clients.  It has a tagging system that means you don’t need to know or write PHP.  That’s it.  To me, a “CMS” really does do everything out of the box—it doesn’t require 50 addons or modules or plug-ins to make it work.  And speaking as a business owner—not a web developer—being “stuck” with EE isn’t all that “cool.”

A breath of fresh air… thank you for posting what it’s like to be the guy paying, instead of the one getting paid. 

There has to be a way to get simple web work done without costing a fortune.  I have not quite figured out the formula, because there are two components that are hard to do cheaply, no matter what systems you are running:
1.  Technical work of hosting, programming, and customizing
2.  Web design

I can do the technical work economically, but not the web design (visual and functional).  Good design work for a simple site is going to run a couple thousand dollars, maybe less if you already have a good logo and design to start with.  Minimum price for a decent logo is $400.  Then it is going to be at least a thousand or two for me to implement it, so that means $3000 - $4000 is the minimum price for a professionally done site.  If you go below that, you are not going to get an awesome result, unless someone is doing free work.

SHOPPING CART
If you already have a decent looking site, adding a shopping cart can be cheap.  These are the steps:
1.  Pick an open source shopping cart
2.  Apply styles based on design of existing site
3.  Enter your products into the system
4.  Connect site to payment interface

I am doing a shopping cart like that now for a client, estimating $1000-$2500.  Looking forward to showing it off when it is done.

@Wildrock:

What you are saying, in essence, is that EE has become like EZPublish:  no small business can use it.  That’s most certainly not been the pitch for years around here, and you know it.  I’d appreciate it, just once, if people would look at the join date on my profile; I’ve been hanging around EE for quite a long time.  One of the reasons I originally bought it was because it was expressly pitched to small businesses.  Now, say what you will, but a small business cannot afford to spend $5K every time they want to update or change their site.  They can’t.  Can they pay $2500, or $3500?  Probably. But they can’t pay $5K or $7K or more per annum.  The average small business in the US, at least, nets, for its owner, less than $100K a year (and many, half that).  How many of those clients are going to be able to just lop 5-7% or more off the top?  Not many.

Now, when I did my first site, for my own business, I took nearly a damn year, obviously, not day-in and day-out, and wrote it myself in my spare time.  I used Boyink’s books and his tutorials and I slogged it out after I found a template that I liked.  (n.b.:  I own an Indy ebook-making firm; everyone here is fluent in at least HTML and CSS, along with XHTML.  Half of us can write PHP, PERL, and almost everyone can toodle along in a little js, as needed.  I endeavored to explain this to the last poster who said, literally, said to me that making an EE site isn’t for “soccer moms.”)  Thus, without denigrating anyone here making their living as an EE “designer” or “programmer,” I do have a little bit of knowledge as to what it takes. 

I’ve tried to find affordable EE’ers to do this or that or the next thing.  When I switched to 2.0, I hired someone to help me, who never understood that my site used Boyink’s method of cross-referencing products, etc., and promptly installed Matrix, if memory serves, making the whole site unusable.  That person couldn’t wait to show me how he’d “improved” my site, until I showed him all the x-reffing code that, somehow, he’d missed. So, back to the drawing board. (Someone here; not some “kiddie” that I picked up on Fiverr.) 

I’m as big a capitalist as the next guy, but there is a certain element of dismissive condescension every time I post on this site, saying “it’s not that much fun to be held hostage by EE.”  First I get the soccer mom treatment (wonder if I’d have gotten that comment if I was using an avatar and sig line that was gender-neutral?), and now this discussion, as if I’m some moron that thinks that all web development should be $200.00. I’ve never said that.  And if the bottom line is, EE isn’t meant for small businesses, then, great:  then EE developers and EllisLab should stop telling small businesses that it IS.  If you don’t have someone in-house; if you anticipate needing somewhat frequent (annual) updates to your site that will take more than 5 minutes of some EE’ers “precious time,” then I’d say, small businesses like mine shouldn’t buy EE.  I don’t think that asking that at least some of you admit it is too much to ask.  And if it means that companies like mine have to think smaller, and not have the features that they want on a website, then that’s what it means, and we can use CMS’s that are better suited for us, or more in-line with our budgets.  (BTW:  you know what fancy-schmancy features my site has?  I have mostly static content.  I have an FAQ and Resources page, which is, woooooooooooo, searchable.  I have completed projects that are linked to the clients.  Oh, and I have a Pinterest-style projects image gallery.  That’s it.  Honestly, it’s not a Conde Nast site we have here with bells and whistles. OH, and a contact us form.  What we do have is a lot of content; lots of projects and lots of clients, so less well-endowed CMS’s like WP choked on it.) 

BTW:  for @leadsuccess: I have not found that EE developers are one iota faster than anyone else; if anything, my experience has been the opposite.  You guys can pat yourselves on the back all you want; but this entire thread has been about how you can/may/should sell EE against other CMS’s, OS or not.  I wonder how many of you have taken the time to wonder how many OTHER people like me are out there, telling OTHER small business owners NOT to use EE, not due to the measly few hundreds of dollars to buy it, or the (ENDLESS) list of addons that you need to buy to have a site that you can actually use, but because of the general attitude that those of us who are actually PAYING FOR IT encounter as we try to slog our way through? 

You guys can be as dismissive of me as you like:  but you know what?  You aren’t the people who actually write the checks for this product; people like me are.  For every one of you, for every EE developer, there are thousands of small business owners who need CMS’s, and who are willing to pay what we can for professional help.  But none of you seem to stop and think about what that means.  If we’re approached by someone touting Joomla, and saying that they can deliver the same functionality for, say, $3500, while EE’ers are saying it will take $8-$10K, you need to ask yourself WHY that is. It certainly isn’t because EE is itself expensive, is it?  That’s not the difference.  That’s the point I’ve tried repeatedly to make; that the marketplace for EE sites is more expensive, by far, than most CMS’s, and it’s not because of the price of the software.  (And, seriously:  don’t get me started about the non-support forums where questions go to die.) 

@DanAllen:  I’ll respond to you in a separate post, thanks!