Now that that’s all installed, you have to go out and search for modules that support your clients needs and then you have to implement a theme. Of course you could go and grab a theme off the shelf, but do you really want to hand off a site with a theme that 100s of others have used. Either you create a custom theme (no small feat I may add) or tweak an existing one (easier but still a task).

Then you have to “manage the code”. A new release or update, you now have to go and update 15 wordpress accounts, 20 Drupal systems, all the while being aware that the modules you used have not been updated yet. And that’s just one site. ughh. I don’t even want to think about it. All this time spent “managing code” when you could be busting out 3-4 new designs for new clients, moving forward.

Plus, the pains my clients have had in the past with custom broken, unsupported CMS’s, $99 bucks a month for something they can simply update and manage themselves is a bargain.

But I’d suggest some more basic features like a calendaring module, newsletter feature, ability to send newsletters by email (Listserve), etc.

Thanks for joining in. I see what you are saying and I hope I can make a distinction between the other solutions you mentioned.

On the web hosting plans you mentioned…it’s that it’s not just the website that is hosted….it’s the whole tool, end-to-end. So, you build your site, preview (and share the preview with customers), and do the CMS, SEO, and all the forms and the associated database/data are hosted as well…all within the platform. And the managed, cloud hosting environment provides a whole host of benefits vs. the traditional hosting model.

The tools you mentioned (WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal), while great for content management, lack in the area of creating pixel-perfect websites. If you want to create a pixel perfect site, you typically would create a site exactly how you want it, then either integrate a CMS on the backend (big bucks), or have service contract with the design firm for the maintenance. The other option is to use a CMS from the beginning (using the CMS environment), but then you lose the control of the pixel perfection. So, it comes down to a conundrum where you have to decide whether to build a custom site ground up and then integrate a CMS, or build the site on the CMS and sacrifice some of the control of the look and feel. That is one of the fundamental things Sitemasher tries to solve by having pixel perfect design (drag-and-drop, Visual CSS, etc,.) combined with a really rich, role based, CMS. Since Sitemasher is aimed at professional web designers, the idea is to allow them to create pixel perfect designs while still allowing the content management to be easy (either for the designer or the customer).

With the pricing, it’s a lot more about TCO when you look at how much it costs to build the site, manage the content and site updates, perform the SEO, etc.

Looking forward to more feedback.