Episode 466 Agency Chat With Ryan Waterbury Alternative CMS

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Show Summary

Rob Cairns talks to Ryan Waterbury about Alternative CMS systems.

Show Highlights:

• As a business owner you can not put all your eggs in one basket.
• Alternatives to WordPress.
• You must future proof your business.

Show Notes

Hey everybody, Rob Cairns here. Today’s podcast I’m here with our regular agency session with Mr. Ryan Waterbury. How are you, Ryan?

I’m doing good and it is our busy time of year and we are packed with work, so that makes me happy.

Yeah, and and neither one of us are living in Tampa Bay at the time of this speaking. At time of this recording, there’s. A. Category 5 hurricane about to hit Tampa head on. So I’m happy because I’m thousands of miles away from that mess.

I you know, I am very happy to be in almost Canada where we don’t have snakes, hurricanes and very few tornadoes.

What I will say is I wish our American Floridian friends. Well, I have family as you know in Tallahassee area. So they got hit hard recently. So I hope Tampa. That’s OK, that’s just started at me too.

I’m.

Today I thought I’d jump into or. We thought we’d jump into. Alternative really alternative CMS content management systems and. I’m not gonna dredge up gramma. That’s already happened. What? One of the reasons we thought we talked about this is as business owners. It’s a bad idea to pitch any business, whether it’s the CMS, whether it’s ads, whether anything on one platform. And I’m I think we can dive into adds a little bit too because I have an interesting story. The. Well, there. But the point is you gotta look for alternatives and. What kind of caused all this was the WordPress grammar going on and without getting into that again, all I know is business owners need to have options. So let’s go there. What do? You think about that?

Yeah, you know, it was a couple of years ago and one of our first joint podcast. We talked about. Don’t put your all of your business on rented land and the and that you know at that time we were talking about businesses that only use Google My Business or only had a Facebook page and no website.

We did.

Mm-hmm.

And we talked about the benefits of WordPress being an open source EMS and you own your data. But with like you said with the drama, I don’t really want to get into it. There’s been plenty of podcasts about that, but we’re finding out that it’s not truly as open as we thought and it’s becoming more rental band again, so. So there are it. It does power about 40% of the web, but it’s not the only CMS out there paid or open source. There are a lot of other options out there that you know honestly as I’ve been doing WordPress work pretty much exclusively since 2014. Now. I heard of that. I had. I had managed a handful of Drupal sites and did work in that realm and then made the switch just because there was a lot more growth in the small business market at the time. That’s changed with a lot of the Dr. My platforms have gotten better, you know. We talked about. Wix is is actively doing a lot of good things to be developer friendly, improve their SEO. Squarespace is also doing that, you know even some of the other open platforms like Weebly have really improved their e-commerce portions of their their options. And I’m not even touching on. You know any of the other open CMS is out there, but you know we need to sit down. And think about. WordPress isn’t always the best solution, and there are. A lot of. Options out there that both paid and free open source. That might be a better fit. So with the with the store that we talked about, I think it’s time to look out there again and and see what else is. Out there and and what might be a better fit for? Your client.

I would agree with you. I’m I was sharing with you in a chat we had and those who don’t know Ryan and I chat pretty frequently at least in text every day and probably by voice every couple days, right? Just to kinda help each other because that’s what we do and we were chatting about this and I said, you know, even my favorite.

Mm-hmm.

3rd host, I shout out to my good friend, Mr. Ong Greece as well known in the Community, runs up a shared host, said to be she called Billy Host and even he’s now about to introduce a. Host website building platform. That’s very similar to a platform that runs right out of the C panel and I’ve kind of been playing around with it a little bit and one things I’m looking at you stand for, believe it or not, it’s for some clients who want wait 3-4 page brochure sites and. I I really think. I hate to say it. I think with everything that’s going on, all the options and clients being budget constrained, maybe a web builder for building A3, four Page Fortress site, it’s actually a good idea. Instead of using a full blown CMS.

Absolutely. And you know, some of the some of the things they didn’t like about those platforms. Now you know, I talked about Squarespace and Wix, you know, and even the, you know, closed site builders. I those would be my second choice, although they’re not a bad choice for a lot of people. And if you’re just starting out, it’s a great way to start. They do have their limitations. It’s hard to get your data out. So you’re starting over. But. When it comes to package with the shared hosting, it’s attractive to a lot of business owners that. Frankly, you know, today don’t have a lot of cash and just want to spin. Something up?

Yep.

Quickly and easily just to get a just to get a a business card site out there and you know, a brochure site and and and they’re great for that. Now the the next step for that you know I I mentioned Drupal and I I really liked it. It was really great for dynamic driven design much better than WordPress and and it’s early days WordPress has come a long way but they’ve got the new initiative where they’ve realized that. They’re an enterprise only solution and that’s where their niche is. So they they have star shot and some new page building tools that are aimed at the DIY’s and small business owners that hopefully will will bring some new life to that plan. Form. You know, as you know, Matt Mullenweg offered Gutenberg and a huge investment and they basically said we don’t like it. We’re we’re are we doing our own. Thing which is great. I think competition breeds better products for everyone.

Yeah, I would agree with you and it’s funny. I was thinking back two days before I got in the web the other day and we did a a cross site that we had an agency do 1st at one time before I was doing this kind of stuff. And they used the CMS I’m trying to think like bakeries, CMS or something, some free open source CMS to build it. So there’s all kinds of options out there. I think you just have to look at. And. I’m with you like one of the things I’ve done is I’ve taken my test domain and I’ve spun up about four different instances and I’m not saying I’m abandoning. That’s what I’m saying is, I’m looking at alternatives to. At the end of the. Day. I don’t think the average client really cares unless they’ve got a WordPress site and then they’re gonna go for something WordPress specific, and that’s a different bargain. But if they’re building a new site from scratch, as long as they get leads which convert to sales. The client could be using Bugs Bunny CMS for all I care, and if they’re making money they’re going to be happy, right? I mean. That’s the reality of it.

Absolutely. And that’s really what it comes down to and you know. I I built the core of my business on you get a website. When I do your local SEO and your paid ads management both at the time it was Facebook and Google pretty integrated in the late teens and into 2020, a lot of local. For restaurants independent travel agents, you know all the things that got shut down. So you know, I shifted back into design and development because the marketing budgets were gone for a while. But what what really work for me and how I was able to grow my team and what I’m doing again. Builds on the other platforms and your website is the hub and the other pieces. Are the spokes. We’re we’re we’re not doing all of our marketing initiatives on one single platform now I have pushed in recent years because. WordPress has had had grown enough and was mature enough to internalize some of these external apps like CRM’s and e-mail marketing, and I still think those tools are nice. But when I work with clients now and they’re getting their leads from Google ads, Google, their Google My Business page. That that we’ve optimized Facebook ads organic social media as well. And then, you know, content on on the website and honestly.

It.

Google has really changed and then in the advent of AI, they’re really crawling the content more and technical SEO as it’s still important. But it’s not as important. So that’s where we’re starting to see platform agnostic platforms that weren’t as strong in the technical half. Like I said, Wicks. Was not one of them one of his great Shopify’s long, confusing URLs weren’t. Right, that’s becoming more irrelevant. And these platforms that that didn’t do well on search actually are starting to get on equal footing to our WordPress was and I think they’re worth a look.

And I’ll give you another one just to throw it out there. It’s square that does most people don’t know that square offers free e-commerce website pages. And the reason I mentioned that is you’re a small business owner. You’ve got say, 3 product. Versus very nice product. Building out a whole site is not overkill and you can set up square to take payments really easy and then point a domain to the. The shop pages and set that up, probably within a couple hours and trying to take money away off table for you and I. But for small business owner that might be an easier way to load and building a full site. To be honest with.

Oh, absolutely. And, you know, sometimes it’s. It’s whoever’s first to market. And if you can get sales out there and you have a viral video and you have a a shop page at square, you could scale that up pretty quickly and make sales. And that’s the important thing it at the end of the day, I’m, I’m an implementer and a marketer. I love doing development. I consider myself love. Average full stack developer and that’s the other part of what some of these other open source platforms are are becoming more attractive to me. There’s more. You need a little bit more dev chats to do some of the special things where. You know, we’d look at the WordPress ecosystem, there’s probably a plugin to do what you want to do already. That can be extended, but if you look at other platforms, you know the open source PHP. Ones you might need to write a little bit more code and so that’s where you know I kind of differentiate that you have your DIY visual site builders Wix grow space, Shopify and Shopify does have some dev capabilities, but it’s not great. I’ve tried, I mean, and even big commerce is is another solution for ecommerce. They’re out there and there’s some wonderful themes and add-ons for all those platforms to do booking, e-commerce, blogging and everything that you would want to do on a WordPress site. And you can do it. Faster. I I gotta be honest.

Yeah, I mean, and I’ll give you a let’s go to another example. You’re you’re you’ve got a WordPress site. And you’re gonna sell one ebook. And we all know our friend, Mr. Devinder at WP weekly, shouted to the best newsletter for news on the Internet for WordPress, uses gumroad for stuff like that. So what? We gotta start looking too at more at in hybrid solution. It’s e-mail marketing’s another one. A lot of people like you like fluent CRM. I know Bob Dunn uses jetpack for his newsletter built in fine. There’s my friend Adrian. Toby. He’s got Groundhog. I shout out to Adrian. Great product. What if you’re doing just the basic news? Sweater. Throw one more out there for you. Spend 50 bucks and find a product by called Send Fox by Appsumo. I mean I use sandbox for my base newsletter because frankly it’s easy. It’s no frills. It looks fine and it gets it out there. And as you know and most listeners to this podcast Know, Move My podcast newsletter. Actually, the substance again, the hybrid solution then people are saying why and if you happen to go over to my website these days, there’s a big banner at the top that says join this pods. I’m stuck here because. Actually it’s a better solution for community than just using a a open source WordPress solution.

The.

Other thing is if you don’t even. Have the jobs or the time to do anything other than the newsletter, MailChimp, constant contact Mailer Lite. They all have landing page builders, so let’s say you’re running an event. You’re small startup nonprofit. You have a list of of people that are interested in supporting your. Does go to MailChimp you want to run an event, set up a landing page and direct the ticket sales to Eventbrite. There’s an integration for that. You know you don’t have to have a full blown site these days in order to to really do some work. I strongly recommend owning your data and being on an open platform. Because, you know, being on somebody else’s land rented land, if they change their terms, you can lose everything in. A minute but. They’re great ways to. Start and they shouldn’t be overlooked anymore at all.

Now I have a a client who’s on the East Coast in the dating space, and we’re building out a website and you know you mentioned tickets and events using Eventbrite. Most people don’t realize Eventbrite will give you the HTML code to embed it, right? The tickets are right in their website. It’s easy and I said to her, you know, you’re gonna come options. They can build this out and woo commerce. It’ll cost you double. Or you can you know for another .2 or .3%. You can offload it all and put in payment processing the Eventbrite and be done with it and it’s for her. Honestly, it’ll probably be easier to manage than managing a loose store. Be be fair. So you also gotta look at what. The capability of the site owner and what do they need and maybe a full born? Site. Isn’t the way to go.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know my customers come to me because they’re small business owners that had done DIY routes and they wanted. They’re in the growth mindset and they need marketing help and they want somebody to manage, manage those things. And you know, we’ve we’ve seen this more often. Leave, but you’ll see fractional CMOS, you know, contracted where businesses are starting to come around again to outsourcing specific parts of their business, you know, and especially the small ones. I mean, I’ve looked at it and you know we talked about that on our last pod. Yeah, I have an accountant, but now I’m bringing on bookkeeping. It’s not difficult, but, you know, I don’t have the time. And I’m in the growth set mindset, so I’m gonna outsource that. That’s great. You know, for clients that want to outsource it and they want to grow and and do flexible solution. And. I will build, you know, with the tools that I’ve invested in and now that’s the other thing I wanted to come around to as an agency. There WordPress still for me makes a lot of sense because I have a lot of tools that I’ve invested in both lifetime deals and agency licenses where I can subsidize those costs, you know, for my clients versus them going out and you know building on the platform you know.

Me too.

When you start looking at Shopify, Squarespace, Wix. Every level that you want to get higher and Shopify is probably the worst where every add-on that you need to do something special it it costs you, you know, and it used to be a $5 add-on. Now it’s like 50 bucks per month. You know, so a lot of those things add up and you know. That’s where you have to start. Start looking is this platform, you know really good for me now.

No you can’t.

Or is it good to? Get into. But you’re right, you know those.

You’ve you’ve landed.

Those customers that have that one or two product ID piece and they don’t need anything more, they’re not going to do anything more than that. You use a a simpler platform.

You kind of gotta look at with Shopify as far as I’m concerned. Do you want to? You know what you wanna do and do you wanna change payment processors cause one of the problems with Shopify.

Right.

Is I happen to know is if you don’t use their payment processor they charge you more. For the transaction. So you’re just gonna sort of look at and say, OK, what is right for me as a business owner? And I think as agencies like let’s talk about the agency side a little. Bit. You need to stop selling WordPress as the solution with a couple of exceptions. The one Ioffer WordPress security services. That’s very niche. So that is a WordPress cell, number two hosting. Well, we know what issues the hosting companies have with their verbiage #3. You need to stop unless you’re a plugin or a theme manufactured that’s geared. Specifically 2 WordPress, that’s different. But beyond that, if you’re building a website for business owner, please sell that this website will get you traffic and leads which generate the sales because frankly the business owner doesn’t care what platform you’re using.

No, they at the end of the day, what they want to see are leads and I have the discussion with a lot of a lot of my clients and you know they come to me because they they want a solution and you know, so my clients recently in greater number. Years, even my PPC clients and SEO clients are asking about e-mail marketing and other marketing solutions. It doesn’t matter what landing page that I drive them to, as long as it’s optimized and it converts for them and that they get leads in their inbox.

Mm-hmm.

Yep.

They, you know, we look at what platforms working the best. Honestly, I’ve shuffled budgets with one of my clients from doing SEO, building that organic up and then looking at where we’re spending our Google ad spend on within that network and Facebook and how that works together. We do a lot of testing, but you. But none of it’s from any single source, and we know the ones that work best. But we also catch really solid leads from all those platforms. They don’t care where they come from. They have an interest that their money is being spent well. But at the end of the day, they’re seeing a huge return on that spend because. They have leads coming in the inbox.

No, no question. And and the reality is and I don’t care what clients say.

OK.

99% of the clients that tell you I want access to my website back end will never log into it and then the other 1% that will log into it are the ones that are gonna cause you and I grief because we’re gonna play around. And do stuff. And insist they have admin rights and we all know where that conversation goes, don’t we? As you sign.

Yeah. I I can tell you that I run my own mail servers just a little sad story and I recently canceled the care contract or violations of terms of. As a client opted to install their, it was a legacy legacy client that brought on not a site that I built. They demanded admin access and I said here here are the terms for that and they installed then a a new form plugin because they wanted a new contract. Arm. Without recaptcha, without any anti spam honeypot.

Ohh no.

And then. They deleted the security plugins and.

Of course they did.

Because it conflict, it blocked something else they wanted to do.

Of course it did.

Which is bad. And and they found and then I found myself with my mail server with 700,000 messages and I had to cut them off. And I and they asked what the reason was. And I had to say, well, you had demanded. And this is one of the few clients that wanted.

Yeah, yeah.

Access and this is also why I self-care because I manage those things. Most of my clients don’t have access to install or update plugins because as you know, they can break things and we want to manage that. But that’s a little story where not everyone needs full open capabilities to do things like that. And that’s where, you know some of the closed platforms like. Square space Wicks. They don’t allow you any of that access unless also, whether not as customizable because you can’t get into the nitty gritty. Of code but. It’s, you know, having unrestricted access is dangerous, but you’re absolutely right. Very few people log in, and even when I’ve had training tools and showing them how to do things, they still submit tickets and ask for work when they want to change a team member, update their address, and they’re. I’m happy to do that and that’s part of the service that I provide, which is great and they’re happy.

Yeah, me too. I I would agree with it. So the the moral of the story here is as a business owner, leave yourself some options. Don’t pitch in yourself in the hole. Look at those options. Keep evaluating new options. I think that’s what makes Ryan and I both very good at what we do is we’re always, I mean, we have conversations almost daily about. Did you read this? Did you see that? Did you do that? If you look at my newsletters, typically the one early in the week that goes up Monday or Tuesday. I almost always throw out some business owner tips there to say OK, here’s some ways to do things. Here’s here’s a tip on video. Here’s a tip on AI. Here’s some things to help you. And sometimes I’ll throw even throw out personal growth tips and say, here’s the way when the tips are to it this week was. How to manage your To Do List and some steps on that so the point is as a business owner you better keep growing and keep your options open and look at them really hard. Right. Brian, anything else you want to add today?

No, I think we’ve covered it and you know the the tool that you used yesterday may not be the tool that you want to use tomorrow. It either doesn’t fit your business or you’ve outgrown the tool and you know, so when you evaluate new tools.

Oh great.

Don’t don’t just pigeonhole yourself into your ones seeing us just because you’re comfortable with it. Sometimes growth is painful, and looking out there, it doesn’t have to be. But you know, sometimes you need to look out and evaluate what’s really best for you at this time, and it might not be what you used yesterday.

Yeah.

Before we go, I wanted to share if you want to catch this episode or other back episodes of the agency chat, Ryan and I do monthly run over to my website stunningdigitalmarketing.com. Click on the podcast and underneath you’ll find there’s a a drop down for the agency chat. Ryan and I do. If you clicked on that. It will just give you those episodes so you can go check those out. Ryan. As always, I appreciate you. Thank you very much for joining me this month and and so we got through a podcast without the agency staff in the Waterbury House. Cold erupting and making noise today.

There’s good reason for that. After spending the my entire Saturday trying to get into ER for X-rays, our more rambunctious office staff member is now on some self sedatives and painkillers for a soft tissue injury.

Yeah. Yeah. I’m sorry about that. I hope he gets well soon and we’ll be back with you next month. Thanks again, Ryan. Have a great day.

It helps. You too. Thanks, Rob.