October 16, 2016 at 03:27How the company abandoned WordPress and replaced it with a self-made CMS
Very often I wondered how much IT companies earn and where much more on website development or site support. Everything became clear when I started working for a new European company that was developing websites: both blogs and e-commerce. They also developed applications on iOS and Android. But their main income was on WordPress sites and on some self-made CMS. The job was this: make up the site and make integration with WordPress. All this had to be done in one day, that is, we riveted only sites every day. We had 5 programmers and the entire web department did this. At that time, I already had good experience developing themes on WordPress, but there was another strange self-made CMS, which I want to talk about in this article.
Their self-made CMS is called Prest. It was developed in Python, and implementing a layout in it is not so easy. Even the client side was quite complicated. The admin panel was made very bad somehow and it was hard to understand how everything works there. It turned out that pulling up layout on WordPress can take 3 hours and everything will be very high quality for the client and easy for the developer.
In principle, we did not write any code on this CMS. We, as well as clients, had an admin panel for developers and we implemented the entire layout right in the admin panel. Even from the beginning programmer, it looked very strange. For example, in the header, we simply inserted all the links to the scripts (modernizr.js, main.js, slider.js), then we uploaded them to the server. The only thing was that for style.css we had a separate block where we could change the styles.
In the aside bar, we immediately inserted the entire HTML block, the same thing happened with the footer. In the block for the main content, in case there should have been more than one article, we had to insert a shortcut, and in repeat we added a new block. In this block, let's call it articles, all articles were placed in a regular foreach loop that inserted all the articles on the page. For e-commerce, they had some kind of embedded plugin like WooCommerce for WordPress.
On the one hand, this CMS worked simply, but at the same time it was very strange and inconvenient for customers. Nevertheless, the company has always tried to put all customers precisely on this CMS.
It turned out that about 70 percent of customer sites were on this self-made system. This is understandable: for example, a WordPress site can be put on any hosting and it is easy to find a WordPress programmer. For a client, this may even be cheaper than the company I worked for suggested. In short, the client can choose the hosting that he likes, and move there with the WordPress site. But with a self-made CMS, he cannot get away so simply, because there it is embedded in the company's host. That is, the client who orders the site always remains the client of this company. At the same time, he paid for any services on the site, even if it was just a change in content. Our company had a content manager that was involved in this.
The most profitable part for the company was renting out a host. A host cost about $ 10 a month. Every month, the company had more and more new customers. At that time, when I worked there, they had about 1000 clients on 4 servers, but besides this they had 3 more servers. When concluding the contract, the client must pay immediately for 6 months and after that he must pay monthly for the host: something like a subscription. On the one hand, the client doesn’t care who they pay: the hostgator or this company, but for the company it was an income of about $ 10,000 per month. Moreover, some clients have been with them since the very foundation of this company, that is, for more than 5 years. Some of them changed the site or switched from a blog to e-commerce, also constantly ordered something: either add some kind of subscription, then social buttons. Each change cost money and the company always had a job. That is, they earned everything, from the development and placement of sites and ending with work with content. The most interesting thing is that the company has always been looking for content managers, because they were always in short supply, since so many customers ordered to write news for them and keep all kinds of blogs.
From this, I concluded and wanted to tell you that it is not so difficult to open a company and clients can be not only from Russia, but also from the entire former USSR and even from Europe. The most interesting thing about this business model is that every month earnings increase. I really liked this idea. Recently, the company has even started making monthly packages. The first package cost $ 30 and for this money they update all plugins, if it is WordPress, and add extensions for the engine, if it is Prest. Within the package it was possible to make 2 such changes per month. The next package costs $ 50 per month and you can make 5 updates, in addition, they blogged for free. The last package costs $ 70 and as part of this, you can hire a programmer for 4 hours or a content manager for the whole day. In this article, I shared business ideas on WordPress and front-end,
Their self-made CMS is called Prest. It was developed in Python, and implementing a layout in it is not so easy. Even the client side was quite complicated. The admin panel was made very bad somehow and it was hard to understand how everything works there. It turned out that pulling up layout on WordPress can take 3 hours and everything will be very high quality for the client and easy for the developer.
In principle, we did not write any code on this CMS. We, as well as clients, had an admin panel for developers and we implemented the entire layout right in the admin panel. Even from the beginning programmer, it looked very strange. For example, in the header, we simply inserted all the links to the scripts (modernizr.js, main.js, slider.js), then we uploaded them to the server. The only thing was that for style.css we had a separate block where we could change the styles.
In the aside bar, we immediately inserted the entire HTML block, the same thing happened with the footer. In the block for the main content, in case there should have been more than one article, we had to insert a shortcut, and in repeat we added a new block. In this block, let's call it articles, all articles were placed in a regular foreach loop that inserted all the articles on the page. For e-commerce, they had some kind of embedded plugin like WooCommerce for WordPress.
On the one hand, this CMS worked simply, but at the same time it was very strange and inconvenient for customers. Nevertheless, the company has always tried to put all customers precisely on this CMS.
It turned out that about 70 percent of customer sites were on this self-made system. This is understandable: for example, a WordPress site can be put on any hosting and it is easy to find a WordPress programmer. For a client, this may even be cheaper than the company I worked for suggested. In short, the client can choose the hosting that he likes, and move there with the WordPress site. But with a self-made CMS, he cannot get away so simply, because there it is embedded in the company's host. That is, the client who orders the site always remains the client of this company. At the same time, he paid for any services on the site, even if it was just a change in content. Our company had a content manager that was involved in this.
The most profitable part for the company was renting out a host. A host cost about $ 10 a month. Every month, the company had more and more new customers. At that time, when I worked there, they had about 1000 clients on 4 servers, but besides this they had 3 more servers. When concluding the contract, the client must pay immediately for 6 months and after that he must pay monthly for the host: something like a subscription. On the one hand, the client doesn’t care who they pay: the hostgator or this company, but for the company it was an income of about $ 10,000 per month. Moreover, some clients have been with them since the very foundation of this company, that is, for more than 5 years. Some of them changed the site or switched from a blog to e-commerce, also constantly ordered something: either add some kind of subscription, then social buttons. Each change cost money and the company always had a job. That is, they earned everything, from the development and placement of sites and ending with work with content. The most interesting thing is that the company has always been looking for content managers, because they were always in short supply, since so many customers ordered to write news for them and keep all kinds of blogs.
From this, I concluded and wanted to tell you that it is not so difficult to open a company and clients can be not only from Russia, but also from the entire former USSR and even from Europe. The most interesting thing about this business model is that every month earnings increase. I really liked this idea. Recently, the company has even started making monthly packages. The first package cost $ 30 and for this money they update all plugins, if it is WordPress, and add extensions for the engine, if it is Prest. Within the package it was possible to make 2 such changes per month. The next package costs $ 50 per month and you can make 5 updates, in addition, they blogged for free. The last package costs $ 70 and as part of this, you can hire a programmer for 4 hours or a content manager for the whole day. In this article, I shared business ideas on WordPress and front-end,