the blog

Enterprise web solutions are dead; they just don’t know it yet.

That’s a bold statement to make, isn’t it?  Have one more:  enterprise web solutions are dinosaurs, and there’s a big bad asteroid named WordPress that’s about to give rise to the mammals.  Here’s how.

Having an up-to-date website is crucial today, not just a nice-to-have.  Companies of every size and shape need any marketing advantage they can get in this economy.  They need blogs and feeds to form direct links with customers and clients; they need to tap into current trends like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube; they need their site to be accessible from mobile phones and by the disabled; and they need to manage it all themselves.

Whew.  That’s a tall order, isn’t it?  If you listen to the enterprise vendors, it’s a gargantuan order, and it’s one that will set you back hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in billable hours, licenses, and support.  Oh, and don’t forget all the additional perks and hardware you’ll need that their partner vendors sell.  The first person you speak to at an enterprise vendor is in sales, and they work on commission.  “Best interest” isn’t in their vocabulary.

In today’s economy, this presents a Catch-22:  companies have to get these technologies to stay competitive and make money, but they don’t have the money to get them.

Enter the new solution.

Free and low-cost software like WordPress, Drupal, Expression Engine, etc. is nothing new.  What’s new is small agencies using these apps to provide cutting-edge websites for medium to large companies for a fraction of the cost of an enterprise solution.  And because these agencies aren’t married to the technologies, they can use the best tools for the job instead of the tools they work for. *cough*

Random House knew this when they contacted us to build the new Knopf Doubleday site.  They’re lucky enough to have a smart and web-savvy marketing director like Jeff Yamaguchi leading the project.  Most corporate environments lack such a resource (or they ignore them).

We worked together with Jeff and Scott Lindsey (a talented sysadmin and developer at Random House) to build a family of interworking sites that are easy to manage.  What we built could rival all but the most complex sites in terms of features, and every bit of it is easy to manage.  We worked as a team with everyone focused solely on this project.  We at Being Wicked blocked out the time and dedicated ourselves to this project from start to finish.  Total design and development time:  5 weeks.

This isn’t to brag about how good we are, it’s to… well, OK, it is a little.  But mostly it’s to show another big advantage of using a small agency:  dedicated time.  We didn’t have fifteen other clients in various stages of development.  We had a few lined up to work with later, but during that 5-week period, as far as our time was concerned, we had one client.

Random House is ahead of the game, but more companies each day are waking up to the same realization: using smaller, more-agile teams with low-cost technologies is the smart way to go.  The technologies have matured and they can perform.  If you don’t believe me, check the top-trafficked sites on Alexa.  WordPress.com is in the top 20, and none of the other 19 use enterprise CMS solutions (they’re all custom-built).

The change is happening, and it’s time to say farewell to the dinosaurs of enterprise.