Reply To: Best CMS for a client?

[Zander]

I had the same experience with Perch as @Ren. Making some editable areas was simple. But the moment I tried to take the next step it was awful.

Perch is advertised as giving a great support. And it is true – you get answers from the developers quickly. Mainly on their forum. But those answers were exactly like @Ren described them. Frugal. Short. Useless. In my opinion (my opinion) the developers of Perch lack empathy for non-developers. I could see, that questions dealing with complicated code problems were answered more thoroughly than stupid questions like mine.

All of my emails with questions I asked if Perch was the right thing for me, that I addressed to the developers before buying Perch, were ignored.

The documentation of Perch is very rich and complex but for me it was a labyrinth. Just to give an idea of how navigating through their support/documentation is in real life :

The main nav bar at the top of the documentation site has 14 menu items (fourteen). Then there is a sidebar with up to another 9 menu items. Thats 23 menu items. Plus sub menus. Plus links in the text. What Perch really needs is a designer. Not to pretty things up, but to manage their content.

I think it is remarkable that the developers of Perch offer a tool for managing content on the web and at the same time don’t seem to have an idea of how to manage their own content on the web for being accessed for understanding. At least by non-experienced developers, as in “ambitious starters”.

Now I guess that their software is actually excellent. But it is far from being “easy”.