Why Perch CMS

What the Heck is CMS?! It Makes Your Site Editable!

CMS stands for Content Management System. It’s an engine behind a website that powers it and enables administrator to log in and shuffle things around. By having a CMS in place, texts, videos, images, pages etc., can be added, modified and re-arranged without all that coding or help of IT people.

What’s more, CMS usually takes care of a lot of “behind the scenes” work such as:

• Automatically generates navigation elements
• Makes content searchable and indexable
• Stores form entries such as enquiries or comments
• Keeps track of users, their permissions and security settings

It’s worth to note that websites powered by CMS are often referred to as dynamic.

But… Perch CMS It’s not for Free Like the Others!

Of course, price matters. Open source platforms are usually free to start with and that’s ok in some cases where budget is limited.

Although the initial set up is free of charge, it often takes significantly more time and skill to build and maintain such websites in the long term.

Perch is priced either per website (£50 + VAT) with no ongoing charges, or by subscription for multi-site licenses. Support is included with every license to help you get going with your project as quickly as possible. In case it’s not a good fit for, they promise to give you every penny back within 7 days.

Sounds fair enough to me!

Why Perch CMS is Different?

There are many great CMS products available on the market such as Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla – just to name few. Unfortunately, they all share one common issue. They try to please everyone by fitting in every business case scenario. Mainly to reach wider audience by being one-size-fits-all solution.

The downside of this approach is that such CMS comes with layers and layers of functionality that most people are not even using. Every feature, automation or functionality that is not being used reflects badly on performance (ie. loading time).

Website becomes bulky, overloaded and difficult to maintain. It’s like driving an 18 wheels’ truck to pick up some bread and milk from a corner shop for your breakfast… Yes, it’s an overkill.

Perch CMS has slightly different approach. Rather than trying to please you by introducing features, that you might need at some point in the future, it starts from the ground up. It’s very lightweight at its foundation allowing to add features to it when they are really needed.

To give you a picture of what is it like to work with Perch, have a look on the typical workflow:

1. Download and install Perch CMS.
2. Add Perch to each page.
3. Mark a region within your page to make it editable.
4. Log in.
5. Edit the region.
6. Save.
7. Refresh the website.

That’s it! This is 90% of what CMS should be doing and you can get there within minutes without all that fluff, settings and configuration.

Of course, you can always extend basic functionality with some battle-tested official add-ons such as event calendar or form later on.

It’s so Simple!

Perch CMS is not only quick and easy to install, it’s been designed to be simple to manage and maintain. Training-wise, even non-technical people are able to get along with Perch after a very short training (~ 1h).

In order to take a full control of the website, user needs to log in, pick a page, pick a region such as “Page Title” and edit it using familiar from MS Word interface. Every region can be described and protected from bad input that could cause for a page to break. New pages can be created in minutes via re-usable pre-defined templates without help of a web designer.

Perch CMS is Tiny, yet Powerful

As mentioned before, Perch CMS can be extended with a number of free official add-ons that are powerful, well documented and easy to integrate. From gallery, events calendar, blog or a shop you can mould Perch CMS into anything you like.

Complete Control

Perch is extremely lightweight and gives you total control of content and code. This means my websites can be easily optimised for performance and search engines.

User Permissions

When managing large sites, dividing responsibilities for other people is necessary. In Perch CMS you are able to hand in a control over a small section of the website to a dedicated group of people. For example, giving a marketing department the ability to only edit press releases.

Conclusion

Choosing the right platform for your website is a difficult process. It’s important to remember that CMS does not necessarily affect the look and feel of your page, but rather manages data behind it. The difference that Perch CMS makes is, that it’s so easy to reproduce any desired look of the website because of its non-intrusive nature.

The whole platform is crafted around the website, not the other way around. In this way it’s very easy for my clients to get a grasp on how to edit their pages. Mainly because each area from their websites is represented within the system by the same name. The less guesswork and distractions, the quicker is for them to work their way through it.

Are you ready to get your next web project done? See how can I help.

See also why others love Perch and why is it worth to switch from your existing CMS.

Hire a Perch CMS Developer

I’ve been building websites using Perch CMS platform for over 6 years and know it’s ins and outs. Let’s work together and build something great! Whenever it’s an existing website or a new project you’ve got in mind. Get in touch and let’s talk about it.

Cheers,
Damian