Sorry for being coy during yesterday’s Product In A Week post. I wanted to get some unfiltered data from the survey I was running. Here’s what we’re releasing this week.
A simple CMS service
I often find myself in a situation where I need to host a few pages of a fully designed site and I need to give edit access to someone without direct access to my servers or my version control repository. I want to be able to setup the site by editing the HTML and CSS directly. Usually, the other people editing the site need a WYSIWYG editor. These sites don’t have high bandwidth or storage needs. I’m thinking of it like PBWiki for websites.
Market Research
Starting with myself, I want something that can host a one page site that I maintain personally, (tonystubblebine.com), a one page site that I setup but that a non-programmer maintains (sarahmilstein.com) and a multi-page site that currently lives in a version control repository which blocks non-programmers from editing it (the static pages on www.crowdvine.com.
In the survey that I ran yesterday, I found that the majority of respondents put up sites that had fewer than ten pages, had less than 100MB of files, were maintained by non-technical people, and got just a few thousand hits per month.
My favorite responses came from the question about what features people use on more than 50% of their websites. The survey results say that the simple sites above can be served by a simple feature set.
I just know that somebody is going to come out of the woodwork and say that a service like this already exists (that would be helpful to know actually). I looked at SquareSpace. It was overkill (although I’m told they’re doing very well). I looked at PageLime, SurrealCMS, and CushyCMS but they all work on the model of publishing to a different site. I want a pure SaaS service. PBWiki doesn’t have the full site customization I need. Google Sites is part of a genre of options that provide page builder UIs. I don’t need that and my survey results indicate that most websites have a professional or HTML savvy person doing the initial setup.
Existing Assets
My goal isn’t to just randomly launch new products–I want to take things we already have and extract them up for a broader audience.
Here’s what we have: a page based CMS, content versioning and rollback, tab and subnav management, content preview, WYSIWYG editor with raw HTML option, Liquid templates that allow overriding of core templates, file uploads and management, custom domains, basic themes, and a simple theme editor. Plus I have an unused domain that I like and a simple logo that goes with it.
Minimum CMS Feature Set
I went into this thinking we’d just take that list of existing assets, put some polish on them, and then put on a creation and payment step. That’s a pretty good minimum feature set that we could get some actual feedback on. It’s not zero amount of work either–the polish and cleanup step has plenty of meat. But if I can I’d like to add one feature based on my survey data. A lot of people need contact forms, I even have a site that needs them, and we have that feature.
These are the things I’m leaving out: multiple roles, FTP publishing, FTP or ZIP upload, photo galleries (use a Flickr widget). Now that I’ve described it, does that sound useful?
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What you have described would be very useful for me. When can I help with alpha test?
Hopefully Friday. I like that you called it an alpha test. If you’d said beta test you definitely would have had to wait a few days. I email you whatever is available by Friday.
How is “publishing to a different site” not the definition of a SaaS site?
[...] we’re shooting for. I think I didn’t do a good enough job of that when I designed my simple CMS service. I was definitely at risk of falling into the feature trap because I really wanted a product the [...]
@Cynthia:
My definition of a pure SaaS CMS would have the creation, management, and hosting of content take place on the same service. In that regard, SquareSpace qualifies, but several of the others do not, because they want to FTP the content pages to your personal server.