Craft CMS and us

In the beginning

We have always believed that to best support our clients, we need to enable them to be able to get on with what they do best, shouting from the rooftops about their products and services and let us get on with what we are best at, helping them reach their audience and making their audience want to buy those products and services.

To facilitate that, we have always hunted out and used the most capable content management systems (CMS) for our clients, and this is where it all began for us with a CMS called ExpressionEngine.

For a good ten years or so, we built and launched some amazing websites on ExpressionEngine for companies like the Independent Newspaper group and the Baker Tilly group, with functionality such as custom e-commerce setups to integrations with CRM platforms for charities. But as our clients needs got ever more complex and we stretched ExpressionEngine further, we realised we needed something more flexible and powerful.

Where Craft fits

What makes any CMS tick is it's ecosystem of third party developers providing functionality that doesn't make sense to include in the core CMS offering. Plug-ins such as email campaign integrations, video serving solutions and even down to minor things like expanding the functionality of the authoring experience.

With ExpressionEngine, one of the biggest third party developers (Pixel & Tonic) had been quietly building their own CMS system that shared the same ethos of providing a flexible and powerful platform for people to build whatever they want on, eschewing the approach used by Wordpress of relying on themes and making any custom functionality and look and feel, more difficult to achieve. The difference with this new CMS in the works, is they had learnt all the lessons from where ExpressionEngine fell short and weren't going to make those same mistakes.

What are the benefits

To say that the new CMS ticked all of our boxes would be an understatement, we tried out the beta version as soon as Craft CMS was released and we were itching to start building with it. Since then, no looking back and we have been able to take advantage of all of their features to both level up existing clients and to offer a whole new experience for new clients too.

Headline features of Craft are:

• Powerful and incredibly user friendly authoring experience
• Unrivalled flexibility
• Unrivalled support
• Bulletproof security
  
• A company ethos that matches ours
• An incredible community of developers and agencies
• Endless scope to extend Craft with plug-ins
• Fast growth without sacrificing support or reliability
• Amazingly powerful First party e-commerce plug-in (first party means made by Craft, not a third party)
• Enterprise level features such as Workflows, muti-site capability, localisation and internationalisation
  

To date, we have built an amazing array of sites with Craft with a dizzying range of features and functions and the feedback we get time and time again is how easy and straight forward it is to use.

Who is using it?

Well, aside from most of our clients of course, there are a wide set of Craft CMS users straddling all industries, and sizes. From "mom and pop" shops to real big hitters such as:

• Moz.com
• The Associated Press
• The Dalai Lama
• PBS
• Intel
• Yale
• SalesForce

This doesn't event begin to scratch the surface of the who's who, but we feel it's a decent reflection of who trusts Craft to power their sites, and hopefully shows you that our clients are in good company.

Why should I use it?

Well, if you haven't found any reasons as to why you might want to talk to us about using Craft on your next site in our blog post so far, I think you might be beyond our help. Just joking! No-one is beyond our help, seriously.

On a more serious front, we have written about Craft CMS and our work with it here, please feel free to have a read and get in touch.