Hi, 

I'm Franz, I dreamt up concrete5 with Andrew. I was studying photography and 3d design when I dropped out of college to make websites in 1995. Andrew, our CTO, chose to get a degree in English instead of Computer Science. We both know a fair amount about programming computers, but please don't hold that against us. I've run an art gallery. Our office uses Macs. Andrew and I are both capable musicians. We both learned our trade freelancing for advertising agencies around Portland, Oregon - so we get it:

  1. "That can't be done" is not an acceptable answer from a programmer. What you mean is there's a better way. 

  2. "It's pretty close" only works for hand grenades and horse shoes.

  3. Nodes, topics, articles, sections, stories - all of those sound like the same thing to us too.

  4. If it doesn't make sense, you've failed – regardless of the "requirements." 

  5. It's not "done" until the check clears. 

I know there's a learning curve involved with anything new, and I know you're inundated with choices for getting your clients some control over their website. I appreciate you've found us at all and read this far, so let me share our goals with you:

  1. I don't want your client to ever call you at 4:59 on a Friday asking for help with a press release that has to go live at 1am Saturday. 

  2. I don't want your chopped HTML to change a single pixel due to the way the CMS works. 

  3. When you're doing training & hand-off with the client, I want them to be ecstatic about the site (and CMS) they just got. If they're scared of their web site's admin tools, we've failed. 

  4. I don't want your client screwing stuff up. We both know they'll try, but you should be able to find a happy balance between flexibility and anarchy when it comes to what your client can do to the final site.

  5. Your client should be thinking about content. You should be thinking about design. The CMS should get out of the way and be a non-issue. 

You're going to find concrete5 is a feature rich CMS with an active community. Your client is going to find it's easy to use, and you're both going to be surprised by how much they can pull off on their own. You're going to get more interesting and lucrative work requests from your clients in the future. You're going to find the costs associated with your project to be low, and you're generally going to wonder how you got by without concrete5 in the past. 

But don't take my word for it. Check out the showcase, read our testimonials, and ask around twitter or the forums. 

 

Best wishes, 
Franz Maruna
CEO, Concrete CMS Inc.