Are GoodBarry (and friends) actually kinda scary?
I haven’t dug too deeply into GoodBerry yet, but I’ve seen enough to make me wonder. Are the “website in a box” solutions that seem to be growing in popularity something to be embraced by the design and development community, or should we continue to promote an ultra-customized, higher budget approach? I have to say that there is something really appealing about the high feature / low cost aspect of solutions like ExpressionEngine, Joomla!, WordPress, GoodBarry, and others.
From the design side, I can always sell a customized interface, but what about the application side? Then again, much like stock photography, what if my client is bent on something from TemplateMonster.com? Does this trend bother you? Either way, how have you chosen to adapt?
Stephen Caudill:
I think there’s a lot of merit to solutions like WordPress. And for customers that want a design from Template Monster, well, thank your lucky stars they won’t be bothering you.
As an application developer, I can tell you two things with relative certainty: 1) I don’t *want* to recreate WordPress. 2) if the application is fun or challenging enough for me to enjoy writing it, WordPress couldn’t do the job anyway.
So from my umabashedly self-absorbed and selfish perspective, WordPress and friends save me a lot of headache
I expect Template Monster does the same for designers. If you’re in a market segment that has you competing with them, it might be time to rethink your approach.
Posted on May 27th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Mike Houghton:
I hear you, Stephen. But looking to the future, I get the sense that the market segment for “solution in a box” clients is growing and the “custom solution” market is shrinking. So as a business owner, do you create your own “solution in a box” or do you hire an expert at one that already exists (like ExpressionEngine) or something else?
Posted on May 28th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Brett:
Hi Mike,
Stumbled across your blog post, and I think You’ve raised an interesting point here. From our point of view, Stephen’s hit the nail on the head =)
“1) I don’t *want* to recreate WordPress. 2) if the application is fun or challenging enough for me to enjoy writing it, WordPress couldn’t do the job anyway.”
We’re really taking that to the next level with GoodBarry, and we hear a lot of comments like Stephen’s from resellers of our software - but replace “wordpress” with “GoodBarry”.
Basically there’s a bunch of functionalities that are becoming more and more “core” to business owners going online. With GoodBarry, we’ve incorporated those core elements - a powerful CMS, ecommerce, e marketing, customer management, and other things - so that web designers and developers can focus less time on the mundane, repeated stuff, and more on projects they can sink their teeth into. It’s really about spending time more efficiently.
I think the key thing about GB is that in the process of creating this platform, we’ve made it highly customizable as well, which further removes those moments when you truly need a custom coded solution. The effects you can achieve with our system without the sort of effort you’d need for custom configuring an OScommerce install, are really pretty nice.
As you point out, the segment is indeed growing and more people are looking to “off-the-shelf” solutions to fulfil their needs. Mostly for cost reasons… but that doesn’t mean designers and coders need to miss out though. I think it’s an opportunity to really recover some lost profit margin, since you don’t need to sink so much cost into pricey development projects.
Anyway, thanks for mentioning us and kicking off an interesting conversation. I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on this.
Posted on July 7th, 2008 at 5:48 am