Hey everyone, I am fairly new to the forum, and I wanted to drop a few lines of what my personal opinion of Mojo, and I have to say, as of right now I am very impressed. I’ve recently started a independent design agency based in the midwest called Mediasans, in which I focus on branding and identity through both print and web mediums, so to find a “lite” CMS for those clients who are trying to establish brand recognition at a relatively lower cost than a full fledge website, is a must have. I’ve been designing websites for a few years now, and what I like above everything else is complete creative control, and I believe Mojo allows that, so here is just a quick review of my out of the box experience with it.
Mojomotor from first glance is an exceptional lite CMS. I’ve spent the past couple of months racking my brain to determine which CMS would be a great fit not just for the short term, but for long term growth and flexibility, and for me, Mojo seemed to be the right fit.
In comparison to other lite CMSs I have tried (Pagelime, Squarespace, LightCMS, etc), I kept running into the same things that I just couldn’t depend on, for a long term investment. For example, many of these require you to host your site on their servers. Now for some this may not be a bad idea at all. However, what if you have a client that wants to invest in that server, and turns around a month later asking can they host the website themselves? Of course some will allow you to export your files, but do you really want to lose a client simply because you could not allow them to host their own website. Another issue that may arise, is how your site layouts interact with their system. The ideal situation from my own personal experience, is having a CMS thats flexible around my design, and not vice versa. Building a website to fit a CMS is not always a great idea; your designs can become very template like, and can lack individuality because of it.
So enough of the bad stuff, your probably wondering why I like Mojo as of right now. Well, first off, I don’t think any CMS is the end all say all when it comes to web design. Choosing a CMS is all about figuring out what fits your project the best, and if your client can benefit from it through its ease of use and functionality. My first Mojo implication is on my own business site, which has stood stagnant for about 6 months due to overhaul on projects, and needs a fresh, updated look that can last. Although I wish that there was more of a detailed walkthrough on building your own site outside of importing them, once I got familiar I immediately found it very easy to create pages, various layouts, embedded content that repeats on each page, minimizing time spent on the way. I’m currently in the process of finalizing my home and service pages on my local server, and I can say its been fun and intuitive. Once I work through a few more pages, I’ll post up another review of what I’ve learned, but for right now, I give it two thumbs up for usability.