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Welcome to Shallow DeepDive, where we take
a deep-ish dive into the shallow world of
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branding, advertising and creative.
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I'm Joe Qualls.
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Today, we're covering why an agency that
likes its content management system went
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and built a second one.
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We should start by not walking anything
back.
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We build on Craft CMS, we've said so
publicly more than once, and nothing about
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today's episode is a change of heart.
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Craft is the best editorial platform we've
worked in.
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When a site has real content behind it,
Craft is still what we reach for and we'd
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argue the case in any room.
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We also built our own CMS this year.
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It's called Kanvas.
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Both of those things are true at once, and
the reason they're true is the actual
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subject here, because it isn't really
about software.
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It's about a decision most clients never
get told is being made on their behalf.
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Here's the decision.
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Almost every agency has one platform.
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It's the one the developers know, so it's
the one every client gets, and every
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project is described as a good fit for it.
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That's not dishonest exactly.
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It is, however, the shop's convenience
presented as a standard.
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And it means the nine-page site and the
four-hundred-page site get handed the same
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machinery, because the machinery is what's
on the shelf.
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For a certain kind of client, that
machinery is exactly right.
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When we rebuilt AJ &
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, the Brisbane law firm we talked about
back in episode five, they needed partner
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profiles filterable by practice area and
an insights section they could keep
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publishing into for years.
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That's structured content with a life
ahead of it.
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Scale up from there and the case only gets
stronger: several people editing, a
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publishing schedule that doesn't stop,
hundreds of pages that have to stay
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consistent with each other, someone
accountable for what goes live.
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Craft earns its keep on all of that.
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Put a site like that on something smaller
and you're doing it a disservice we'd be
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back to fix in two years.
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But a good share of the work isn't that
job.
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It's a studio, a practice, a small
developer, a family business with a good
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and nine pages to tell it in.
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They have no publishing cadence.
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They are not going to run a newsroom.
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Two or three times a year somebody changes
a phone number, adds a person to the team
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page, swaps a photograph that has started
to look dated.
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Put that client on a full editorial
platform and you have given them a
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engineered answer to a question they did
not ask.
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The cost of that is rarely the licence.
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The cost is the standing knowledge
required to operate it, and the fact that
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only person who has that knowledge
invoices by the hour.
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Every small change routes back through us.
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Which is lovely for us, and slowly
corrosive for them, because after the
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invoice for a phone number they stop
making changes, and a site nobody changes
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site that quietly goes out of date.
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Over-tooling always looks like generosity
at the time.
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You'll grow into it.
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Mostly they don't grow into it, because
they never needed that shape of growth.
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What they needed was a site that stays
accurate.
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So we built Kanvas for that end of the
work, and it's small deliberately.
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It's a visual CMS for design-led sites of
modest size, and almost every decision
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inside it is a consequence of who is doing
the editing rather than a criticism of
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anything bigger.
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The editor spends the design decisions
rather than reinventing them.
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Colour, type and spacing are set once for
the site, and the page editor uses them.
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You can write, arrange, add, remove and
publish.
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You cannot make a heading purple because
it's Tuesday.
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That's not us being precious.
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Hand a person who isn't a designer a blank
canvas and every control we own and you
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haven't given them freedom, you've given
them a second job they didn't apply for.
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The narrower editor is the more respectful
one.
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The published site is static output, so
the public pages stay up even when the
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editing
Load full transcript
system, the login or the database
doesn't.
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And each site Kanvas builds is genuinely
its own: its own repository, its own
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database, its own deployment, nothing
central for all the sites to phone home
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If Qualls stopped existing tomorrow, every
one of them keeps running and any
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competent developer could pick it up.
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That's not sentiment, it's a constraint we
imposed on ourselves, because an agency
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that can hold a client's website hostage
will eventually be tempted to.
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I came at this from a particular
direction.
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When I moved to Australia in 2018, I'd
spent fourteen years in New York working
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clients with marketing departments, where
there was always a person whose actual job
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was to own the website.
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Here, working with small independent
businesses, I met the other situation, the
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common one: the client is the marketing
department, and the operations department,
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and they're doing the website update at
nine at night.
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Every assumption I'd carried about who
edits a site, and how much patience they
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have, turned out to be wrong.
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You design differently once you've
pictured that person, tired, on a laptop,
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to change one sentence.
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Now the fair objection.
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Running two systems is more work than
running one, and building your own CMS is
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well-known bad idea, filed next to drawing
a bespoke typeface for a client who asked
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for a logo.
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We'd agree with the general rule.
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The specific case is narrow: this exists
for the jobs that don't need the full
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muscle, and the moment a project has
genuine editorial weight, we're on Craft
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glad of it.
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If we ever find ourselves talking a client
out of the bigger system to keep them in
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ours, that's the failure, and it will be
obvious.
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The test we apply is simple enough that
you can apply it to us, or to anyone
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you.
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Not "which CMS is best," which has no
answer.
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Ask what running it will feel like in year
two, with the staff you actually have and
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the cadence you actually keep.
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Ask what happens when you want to change
something small.
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Ask who has to be involved.
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Because the platform choice gets made
early, quietly, usually before anyone has
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drawn a page, and it sets the terms for
everything afterwards.
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It's a strategy decision wearing a
technical costume.
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And the honest version of it isn't picking
the most capable system available.
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It's picking the one that fits the size of
the job, which sometimes means the
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serious editorial platform and sometimes
means far less than anyone would sell you.
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Thank you for indulging us in today's
Shallow DeepDive.
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We hope you'll join us for the next one.
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Until then, take care.