Grab a Perch

10 August 2009

We just wrapped up a website project a few days ago that was similar to a lot of others: a small site with just a handful of pages, most of which containing content which would be quite handy for the client to be able to update themselves.

A month ago I’d have recommended Bluebird, our own CMS written in Ruby on Rails which makes page editing super straight-forward for clients. So why not Bluebird this time? First, while Bluebird can work great for just about any site, it’s a powerful system with somewhat complex underpinnings — ideal for a site that has serious content management needs, but borderline overkill for your smaller site that has simple CMS aspirations. Second, I had just been introduced to Perch.

I don’t recall how I came to arrive there, but five minutes on their website had me convinced that I needed to give Perch a try the first opportunity that made sense. It focused on simplicity above all else: simple to install, simple to incorporate into your site, and simple for your clients to use. From their intro video, you could tell that the creators had sweated the details. And to top it off, the ~$60 price tag seemed more than fair.

So, without wasting any time, with anneandpetesibley.com dialed in and ready to launch, we decided to spend an extra half-day adding Perch into the mix so they could be in control of their own pages.  (This is one of the benefits of Perch — it’s not a platform you have to build upon, but rather an extra layer which you can drop on top of existing sites.)  Perch keeps the technical stuff out of the way, letting non-technical people add content to the site which they know will be presented as intended (thanks to Perch’s templating system.) It was a win for everybody, and a huge pleasure to use.

After this trial project, Perch has become a tool that we look forward to using in the future.