Quick.CMS: Simple CMS, Easy Admin
When I build a site for a small company — especially those with only one or a few people — the website is often not the main part of the business. The site needs to be professional, clear, and easily updated, but there isn’t one person whose only job is to maintain the site. There’s often not even a single person handling marketing (including the site), but one person wearing many company hats. Quick.CMS’s simple and intuitive administrative tools are one reason why I’ve built sites using it. The fact that it uses a flat-file system instead of a database — which is fine for these small sites — has the added bonus of being easy to install on a client’s server.
I’ve looked at many different content management systems (Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, TextPattern, to name a few). One thing they had in common was very powerful and customizable templates. Unfortunately, this also resulted in more complex administrative tools. These small business owners want to spend their time actually running their business, not learning a new application to manage their website…and then sometimes re-learning it when they want to update their site weeks or months later.
The Quick.CMS admin tool makes it extremely easy for people to edit and update their site. It’s not the most powerful CMS platform, but it gives site owners the control they need. I’ve trained clients on the Quick.CMS admin tool in less than 30 minutes, after which they were already editing and adding new pages.
However, one of my complaints about Quick.CMS is the lack of polish. The default template isn’t very good and the add-on templates aren’t much better. Luckily it’s highly (if not easily) customizable, so with some work I’ve been able to change it to do what I need from a layout and design standpoint. The administrative tool UI is also very basic-looking — nothing flashy or fancy at all, perhaps a little dated. However, my clients who have used it have been satisfied with it…and they’re more concerned with how their customer-facing site looks more than then admin tool behind it.
You can download and try Quick.CMS from their site, or contact me about getting your own site designed.