I Want to Give Six Apart My Money
I Want to Give Six Apart My Money
Saturday, June 3, 2006 10:08 PM (permalink)
A few days ago, Mike Rundle wrote an interesting comparison of Movable Type vs. Wordpress over on the Business Logs site. Since there are many users of both, Mike's post generated a lot of passionate comments, many of them anti-Six Apart. I'm no designer, and little more than a hobby-ish developer--my day job keeps me busy enough. But I am a licensee of Movable Type, and I have used Wordpress for various little projects, so the technical aspects of Mike's piece don't fly completely over my head. There is, however, another decidedly non-technical aspect to Mike's comparison that bears amplification.
About a year and a half ago, soon after I joined Edison, I pushed very hard to get our website (a hideous, out-of-the-box Frontpage special) redesigned to make publishing content easier. Edison has grown into a thriving and profitable business, in no small part due to an aggressive thought-leadership strategy of continually putting new studies and analyses into the market. When I took on the task of turning our website into a more effective platform for these purposes, I turned to Movable Type to handle all of the static and dynamic pages of our site. If you visit the site now, the design may be a little kludgy (which is not the fault of the person who did the original stylesheet--anything that looks bad I probably did), but the site works like a charm, is well-optimized for search engines, and is dead easy for the folks back in the office to add columns and studies to.
The success of this modest redesign in 2004 has given me a bit more leeway (and budget) in 2006 to really spruce it up, and we have engaged the aforementioned Mr. Rundle to do the job (and I can tell you, it is going to look fantastic.) We had the option of moving to a new platform, and I am very cognizant of the increased traction Wordpress has with developers and designers. I am sure there are more Kubrick-themed websites out there than people who even know who Stanley Kubrick was. We chose to stick with Movable Type, however.
Now, I can give you a few technical reasons why. We are going to launch two auxiliary blogs to accompany the Edison site redesign, and Movable Type makes administration of multiple sites under one interface dead easy. The interface itself is very professional and just "feels" more robust than many of the other options I have tried. And, frankly, I know how it works, and inertia plays a role here, too. The biggest reason we are staying with Movable Type, however, remains the same as the reason we started with Movable Type in the first place. There is a there there, as one of my colleagues at work might say.
We have had three or four reasonably serious problems with the site in the past couple of years, and whether they were due to Movable Type or not, the support staff at Six Apart solved every one of them, generally within an hour of our initial ticket. We pay for that support within the terms of our commercial license, and the fact that there is a company there with a tech support function is 100% why we will continue to use Movable Type for our site. I am no Luddite, and am not afraid of getting my hands all code-y while I monkey around with my little hobby. But, again, I am but a dilettante when it comes to web design and development. I am not arrogant enough to think that the tiny bit of knowledge I have that enables me to get this article published on the web will save Edison from some kind of MySQL disaster. But Six Apart once saved me from a MySQL disaster, and got us back online in an hour. That's money to us.
Look, I know there is a huge community of developers out there who are more than happy to help out with Wordpress. If I am building a website for personal reasons, I might use Wordpress (have done), Tinderbox (this site) or even iWeb, for crying out loud, as I have done for my personal site (ugly URLS and bloated code be damned--there is currently no easier way to get my family photos out of iPhoto and onto the Web, and I am all about easy.) I really like Wordpress, for many of the reasons Mike mentioned. I also know that there are hundreds of folks out there who are available on a contract basis to fix Wordpress problems for a fee. What you have to realize, though, is that to a small business such as ours, retainers and hourly developer fees are "variable costs." A Movable Type license is a fixed cost. Fixed costs can be capitalized, predicted and budgeted for.
I have met some of the folks from Six Apart; I have even asked Six Apart's Anil Dash to be a speaker on a technology panel I moderated last year at the National Association of Broadcasters' Radio Show. They are smart people, and seem to have a business there. That is important to us. Again, NO disrespect to the Wordpress folks--and if we wanted a hosted solution, wordpress.com might have been a real option for us. But to me, there aren't really a lot of options for small companies like ours who don't have a full-time web development staff but want the stability of a license and paid support. So, for us, Movable Type vs. Wordpress is currently a non-starter (though Movable Type vs. Expression Engine is a more interesting comparison for our purposes.)
Wordpress is great--the more I play around with it, the better I like it. But unlike many of the folks who deserted Movable Type for Wordpress, I need to pay for it. If our site goes fakakta, we can't wait a day--we can't wait an hour.
