Do You Know Your SaaS From Your Elbow? Content Management In Plain English – Episode 39

There are systems out there that some agencies champion. Oh, yeah. We use, you know, concrete CMS. It's like there's probably a perfectly good CMS, but if you fall out with that agency or they go kaput, then you're going out into the marketplace. Suddenly there's only like three agencies in the UK to do it. And so you're going to be paying higher prices because they're in demand, because nobody else uses that, don't have the capacity or they don't have the capacity to take you on. So yeah, I mean, sticking with fairly well known mainstream systems makes sense. These are the systems that are getting constantly evolve, developed, improved. There's a good community of support. There's a lot of agencies will be able to help you if you if you come unstuck, that kind of thing. You're welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Um, today Julie and I say, hello, Julie.

Hello, Julie.

Today, Julie and I. Oh, it's gonna be like that.

Yeah. It is. It's one of those days.

We're going to talk about, uh, content management systems. Um, I'm a bit of a geek, I suppose, um, less of a geek these days than I used to be, but I'm a bit of a geek. Julie is definitely not a geek. Very clever.

Thank you.

Very clever.

Very clever for a non geek.

Mar tech specialist.

Oh, I like that.

Yeah, yeah. Very clever. Um, however, he's coming at this not as a geek who builds websites at the technical end but actually puts content into websites.

So from a marketing person's point of view really. Yeah, yeah.

That's right. So we're going to talk about content management systems, what they are, where they came from, different types of content management system, um, levels of different types of uses. And we're just generally going to paint the picture because I think from what we gather, a lot of people are kind of a bit confused about it. They think that the content management system they choose is the be all and end all. Maybe.

Well, I think even before that, you know, content management system, what on earth is that? What does it mean? People get mixed up. I think people talk about content management systems, which is a CMS, but then there's the CRM and we find people a lot talking about CRM and CMS and thinking they're interchangeable.

I'm already confused.

They're actually two completely different things. Yeah. CMS is the content management system where you put stuff into your website.

Which is what we're going to talk about.

Today. CRM is your customer relationship management system, which is basically your customer database. And they, they're two different things, although confusingly, they can be all part of one system, but we'll go there another day.

In fact, in a perfect world, they are part of one system. They're certainly connected.

Yeah, ideally they're connected.

If it's a business growth website, if it's a website that's been developed to generate leads and do all that sort of stuff, then it should be connected to a customer relationship management system. Okay, so you've already said that. I see.

It is.

Using a CMS. A content management system is used for putting stuff onto websites.

Yeah. Making making changes. I would say from a marketing person's point of view, when you're saying, oh, you know what content management systems they're using, is there a content management system? It's because you're thinking, right, I'm going to have to make changes to this website further down the line. And I need to be able to get in and, and edit stuff.

Right. So in the olden days, you could do all that. You could edit web pages and put content in and embed videos and put forms in there. You could do all that. It's a piece of cake. You just write code and do it.

Oh really? Yeah, actually I have done that. But yeah.

But therein lies the problem. And then yeah. And the problem really that content management systems solved was to put the website and the management of the content in the website into the hands of the communicators, the marketing people, the salespeople, even subject matter experts.

Yeah. And letting people actually go in and, and add words or change words or add new pages, just words. Well, words and pictures, but, but on the whole words, because quite often you can add the pictures and you can make a terrible mess of it. So on the whole, the safest bit is adding the words. Um, you need a little bit more skill to add the pictures normally because, because you can, you can mess pictures up quite easily. Um, but, but changing the words without having to go and actually know any code.

Yeah. And the tools existed to do that a long time ago. Tools like Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage.

I learned Dreamweaver a little bit.

Yeah. And it was like a graphical user interface for building web pages. Um, when content management systems didn't really exist. I mean, modern content management systems effectively are the front end of a database. You, you, you are using a system to put data, words, pictures, whatever it is, into a database. And then when web pages are created, they pull all the information out the database depending on what somebody clicked and build the page and then and then squirt it down the wires into a web browser. And that's what happens. Yeah, essentially. So you can do that by writing lines of HTML and or you can do that using a graphical user interface like Dreamweaver. And what all of these systems did was effectively build standalone pages. You could connect them, but they were effectively all standalone pages.

You did need some code for Dreamweaver. You needed some basic HTML for, for Dreamweaver. Um, but then there was also like the, the systems that your web agency would build where they gave you a little box and you could put some words in the little box. Okay. So that was the sort of next level for people who couldn't do the Dreamweaver bit.

That's right. I mean, when I, when I worked at Fifth Ring back in the early two thousand, um, content management systems were really in the very early stages and we needed to create a website for a local housing association. And they said, look, it'd be great if we could edit the thing ourselves once you've built it for us. And so we built a content management system. We actually started from scratch and we built a content management system, which they loved, because what we could do is we could say, well, what do you need to be able to change on the website? And we built a system that allowed them to change those bits on the website. And that was the early incarnation.

Used a few of them. So your agency would build a little bit on the back end where you could just, you know, change the bits you needed to change. But what happened was if something happened to the agency, if you sacked them, if they went out of business, you then went to a different agency and they were like, well, the, the old agency wouldn't give them access to the, to the content management system because the old agency owned it. So then you were stuck with a website that nobody could update because the the old agency wouldn't let the new agency have have their content management system because they built it themselves. It was their technology. So that system fell down quite quickly, I think.

Yeah. And to a certain extent, that still happens today. And what happens today is someone will come along and, oh, you'll, you know, a company will go to a new agency and say, right, we need somebody else to look after our website and the new agency go, oh, well, it's built with craft and we don't use craft. We use WordPress. And by the way, craft's rubbish. You need to build it with WordPress and we'll need to rebuild it for you. And it's, it's just a horribly confusing and, and, and somewhat disappointing situation really when you think about it. It is. I mean, you can't expect all agencies to be able to be masters of all content management systems because there are hundreds of them.

Yeah, there's loads of them. And, and although they all kind of do the same thing, they're all they're all kind of work in slightly different ways. And yeah, any decent agency would be able to find their way around any of them, but they wouldn't be able to figure out necessarily how it had been built. And, and the sort of the, the more complicated bits of it. Because, because they don't know how it, how it all kind of fits together.

Yeah. That's right. So we had homespun and you could quite often see websites that were like, you know, powered by, um, you know, Acme agency, CMS or something like that. You know, they made a big deal out of it. And for a while, agencies worked hard at developing their own content management systems as a unique selling point. Yeah. You know, this is like, you know, if you come to us, you'll get to use our content management system that we built that nobody else has got access to. And look at all this stuff it lets you do.

Yeah. Because it was still a big thing. I mean, people would go and say, you know, we want a new website and we want to be able to update it. And, you know, that was an extra on the brief because it wasn't automatically built into anything. It wasn't.

Built. That's right. Yeah. Um, fast forward a little bit and there are now lots of content management systems available, and they're either available as a piece of software which you install on your own server like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal craft. There's loads of them. Um, or they're available as what's called software as a service, a SaaS.

So that sort of thing. You would pay a subscription for monthly and you would use someone else's website basically.

Yeah. Basically it's somebody else's servers. You don't have to think about the tech. And some obvious examples of that would be Wix, for example. That would be a SaaS service. Squarespace is a SaaS service. Um, Shopify, when it comes to e-commerce is a SaaS service. Yeah. And they are good. I mean, SaaS services like that are good.

We've used Shopify quite a lot.

Built a few sites with.

It. Client just pays a monthly fee and they don't have to worry about hosting or service.

Just before we came on to record this podcast, I was on a Shopify website, Brullo Brullo Babis down in Edinburgh. The alcohol free beer is fantastic and no, this isn't an advert. They haven't paid me to say it because we don't do ads.

Maybe they will now.

They might. They might send me a free kick.

Somebody tell.

Them. Yeah, but their beer is fantastic. I mean, they're alcohol free. Beer is fantastic. And I went on and, you know, there it was Shopify. And it works well.

Very many of the, you know, for smaller companies, if you're buying stuff off them, it's nearly always a Shopify site. Yeah.

They've got a huge share of the market and for good reason. I mean, anybody that tried to run a content management system, an e-commerce content management system where they had to run their own server, keep the software up to date for quite a lot of them. It was a nightmare. I mean, you know, e-commerce systems in particular.

And they were horrible things to use.

Definitely.

They didn't really work properly. There was always something that didn't work and you had to go back to them and go, this doesn't work, and then wait for them to fix it. And yeah, whereas Shopify is just very, very smooth, I.

Think in-house here at Red evolution, we, we tend to build new projects with either Joomla, which is an open source content management system. Open source is as is, is free as in speech, not free as in beer and open source software. You can download it. You can upload it on your own server, you can use it. And great. So another example of open source that everybody's heard of is WordPress. Yeah. We also have, um, you know, top notch WordPress skills, but the WordPress sites that we, that we have in our management are sites that generally speaking, other people have built and then we've taken them on board, fixed them, sorted them out, got them up and running, which is not a tool, a system that we would use by choice.

Our developers think that it's, it's more designed for people who want to sort of work on a live site and just sort of develop it themselves, whereas Joomla is more aligned with the way developers work, I think.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm reluctant to say that Joomla is better, although if you speak to geeks, quite a lot of geeks would say Joomla is better because it's a more structured approach. Yeah. And when we pick up WordPress sites, they're quite often in a bit of a mess because they've been built by designers rather than developers.

And so yeah.

And they can just get, you know, they can get a bit upside down. And the other tool that we would use is a SaaS tool, which is Julie.

It's the software as a service. We were talking about where you pay a monthly subscription and we are big fans of HubSpot.

We are huge fans of HubSpot.

Which we may have mentioned occasionally.

We may have mentioned it from time to time.

We also use Shopify. As we said, it's also stars, but we do know for for an e-commerce site. But yeah, for, for actual, um, sort of normal.

If you think about projects that we've got on the go, on the go at the moment, I mean, as in new build projects, we've got HubSpot, we've got, I think we might have a Shopify somewhere kicking around, at least in development or post post go live, but still getting stuff done to it and, um, and some Joomla stuff as well. Yeah, yeah. That's right.

So and, and WordPress sites that we're sort of yeah. Building on and improving. Right? So yeah, we would, we would work.

Whenever we get a new customer and it's WordPress. The devs always groan.

Oh they do, but they're, they kind of, they're kind of accepting of it. Yeah. Um, that's how it's been built. Sometimes even even I can see some of these WordPress sites that, that it doesn't make an awful lot of sense. Joomla seems to have more structure to it. WordPress seems to be a lot more flexible, so you can make it confusing more easily.

Yeah. That's right. Um, yeah. Okay, so what we've got so far is we kind of understand what they are. They're tools that let Non-geeks create new web pages, edit web pages, manage web pages, manage a website. It's not just pages. There's all sorts of functionality like creating forms. You might want to put a form on a page for people to fill in. Yeah. And, you know, using a content management system, that's a piece of cake, especially HubSpot. Not, not to, you know, not to push that too hard, but I mean, their form.

Building is just.

Beautiful. It really is. It's a great piece of kit. But there are also standalone forms, generators like Google Forms and all sorts of things like that. So you can create forms and then embed them in your website. And so there's lots of other solutions. Um, and what else do we need to say about. We've covered like, you know, different ones, like the ones we like Joomla, WordPress, HubSpot, other ones that are, that are particularly good, I think. Um, and just to say, like WordPress powers a lot of the internet.

Something ridiculous.

Like half the internet sites are powered by, by use or use WordPress. Yeah. Um, craft is a really popular system with designers especially. It's a, it's a really nice system. We've flirted with getting some craft expertise, but we've never actually bothered. And then when it comes to e-commerce, we mentioned Shopify. And the other one, which a lot of people have heard of. Big scary piece of kit, Magento. Yeah. And Alex, Alex, uh, he used to work with an agency that specialised with Magento and it is a big scary piece of.

Kit tends to be agencies tend to specialise in Magento. That's all they do. And they have all the skills because it's for like really big shops.

That's right, that's right. And a sort of up and coming ish. It's established, but it's not that common when it comes to content management system. It's an interesting concept is a thing called headless CMS.

Yeah. I can't I can't get my head around headless at all. I'll explain it to me.

I'll try. Um, so headless CMS sounds weird and geeky. And what it's really saying is when a business has content, whether it's blog posts, web pages, PDFs, whatever it is, they have content. And that content might be used in a number of different places. It could be used in a website, it could be used in an intranet, it could be used in a web app. It could be used in an iOS app. It could be used in a lot of different places. So what it does is it it provides a system for creating content without concerning yourself as to where that content's going to get consumed.

It's a store.

Yeah, exactly.

A warehouse for content.

So for example, you could use, I mean, uh, HubSpot are developing their headless CMS offering. Uh, I believe you can use Joomla as a headless CMS. You can use WordPress, I think as a headless CMS. And what you're actually doing when you do that is you're using the content management system, bit of the content management system, but you're not using the front end building web pages. The bit that people see as part of the content management system.

I have an example that it may prove that I've understood it, or it may prove that I completely haven't understood.

Got time to go and get a cup of tea?

Probably. Um, so we have a client who has a WordPress site. They also use HubSpot for their customer relationship management, their CRM, and for creating landing pages, forms, and.

More landing pages.

Okay. A landing page is a page that you would probably go to from an advert or a particular campaign. Yeah. Campaign. So you would, you would get people there and it serves one single purpose. So you would build it separately to the rest of your website because it just serves one purpose almost. And it wants to do one thing. So say you've got a Google ad and you click on the Google ad and it says, you know, get this special offer. And then you'd build a landing page for the special offer. So it just made you get the special offer and didn't distract you with lots of other things. So anyway, yeah, they've got HubSpot for landing pages and forms and buttons and things like that. Um, they also have videos and files and downloads and things in HubSpot, but, um, they build, I was doing a page on their main website, which is in WordPress. Um, and I had to put a video on the page, but the video was in HubSpot.

Yep.

So I just got the link from HubSpot and got the HubSpot video into the WordPress page. And it worked. I still do have no idea how that worked, but I pressed a button and I checked and it did definitely work. So is that is that the same idea using HubSpot almost as the store for the files? Yeah. And telling the WordPress site to go and get the files from.

It is, but you also use Vimeo and you use that all the time and you put videos on Vimeo, our Vimeo accounts because you should never we came across a site we had an enquiry in this week and it was somebody who's got quite a pretty website. It's got some issues, but it's quite a pretty website, a high end property company, and they've got nice video backgrounds. And those videos were on the web server as opposed to on a video web server, you know, a system that's actually designed to stream videos efficiently. Um, so.

And that just makes their website very, very slow.

It does, it can do. Um, so you use, you're familiar with Vimeo, you use that all the time and you're happy embedding it Vimeo. So if you think that Vimeo is like, it's almost like a, a little bit like headless.

It's a video.

CMS.

Yeah.

So you put all your videos in there and then you can put them wherever you want. You can put them in a HubSpot page or WordPress page, or you could.

Even.

Put them in a landing page. You could link to them in an email. Yeah. So it's that.

You can.

Put them.

On social media. Yeah.

That's right. So headless is a really interesting idea because it just lets content producers produce content and not worry about where it's getting used, where it's getting consumed. That's been that's at the other end of the scale. You can also then build web pages, which are really, really lightweight. They've got, they've got the bare minimum of stuff in there to work properly.

So they're really fast.

Yeah. So they can be really fast, which can help.

Google likes fast web vitals.

Yeah. Um, which is an interesting subject, which we'll maybe cover at some point, this idea of getting the website fast. We do get a lot of people calling us and saying like, oh, my website's coming up really slow and you need to fix it. And no, it's, that's the reason I'm not ranking in Google. It might be part of the reason.

It's very, very slow.

Yeah. That's right. But nobody's nailed this yet, especially on mobile. I mean, even Google, Even Google's own web properties.

Seventy percent.

Yeah, even less, sometimes even less. Yeah. And we and you'll see websites that have poor speed scores, poor core web vitals scores ranking really, really well. So it's early days for that stuff. But that's an example where you could create a web page that's really bare bones, and then you just pull information in from your headless CMS and boom, you've got lightning fast web pages. Plus it means, for example, if you've got a piece of content that's used in on a web page and on a landing page and in a web app and in an iOS app, and it appears, I don't know, in a digital marketing, you know, like one of those screens that people have.

Yeah.

And you think, oh, we found a typo. Well, you go and change the typo in the headless CMS and it's updated everywhere. It's like, you know, it's a one source of the truth.

Yeah. Or you update whatever. Yeah. You update it and you don't have to go. Right. Okay. Where's this? Oh my goodness. It's on that as well. We forgot about that. And they're still getting the old one. And yeah I can see a lot of benefit to that.

I mean one of the things when content management systems came about, one of the things that was that you would help, you would say to people to help them understand it, is that a content management system like WordPress, Joomla, Kraft, all of these systems, they separate the content from the presentation. So the presentation is what it looks like when it's in a web page. When it's finished, the content is just the words, the images, the videos or whatever. And the.

CMS. When you say presentation, you mean the kind of layout, the style, the color.

That people see when they go into Google. They do a search, they click on a link and they see a web page. That's the presentation layer. That's all of the data pulled in from wherever it is, whether if it's headless, it could be coming from all over the place. If it's Joomla, it's coming out of a single database. WordPress the same usually. And that presentation layer. Um, and we used to, in the early days, we used to demonstrate that to people because we used to spin up a website like a dev site. And then we used to show them the website. And then we used to go into the back end and change the template it uses, which is the look and feel, right? Change it to something else, save and then go back to the web. Bingo. There you go. Same website, same content. Now it looks completely different. Oh, right, I get it. You know, and you had that difference between content and presentation. Well, headless is turning into a podcast about headless CMS, which I don't know enough about to do a podcast on, if I'm honest. But the headless CMS text that to, to the extreme, it completely separates content from wherever you're going to show it. If you see what I mean. I think it's quite exciting. I'm quite interested. And, and I think what's interesting, when we were in that HubSpot webinar last week, they were talking about it saying, well, you can kind of do it at the moment with HubSpot. It's a bit of a fudge, but it's on the roadmap. And in the next couple of years, you would be able to use HubSpot as a headless if you wanted to, which is quite exciting and quite interesting. Oops, the screen just gone off, right. Um, well, we've been going a million miles an hour and covered quite a lot in that, in that short space of time. Um.

Yeah, I think the thing is, if you're, if you're a marketing person and you're trying to get a new website.

I'm not winding it up.

Okay.

No, no, I was just saying you've covered quite a lot and I'm trying to decide what on my list we haven't covered yet.

Yeah, well that's okay. That's what I was saying, though. If you're a marketing person, you're talking about you're you're wanting your website. You, you shouldn't get too hung up on the whole CMS thing. Do you think?

Yes, yes.

But yeah. Okay.

Okay. So in theory, a content management system builds a page on the fly. And by that I mean when you click a link, a menu, say you click a menu link, you're on a, you're on a company's website and you go, oh, there's an about link. Yeah. Let's find out about this business. Let's see what, where they came from, who they are. And you click the about link. What's happening in the background is when you click the link, the server is told build this page. So the server will then grab the template and it will go and grab all the content it needs out of the database from different tables in the database, build the web page and use on on server side it will be using either Microsoft stack like ASP or it'll be using Um, pee pee, which is another another coding language or it'll be using Ruby or it will be using Python. There's all different languages, all lots of different languages.

But I think we're.

It builds the page and what it squirts back to the web browser is HTML. Yeah. So that's, that's what's happening. Remind me what you asked me because I lost the plot. Now that's what's happening.

If you're wanting a new website, should you get worried about which CMS you're using or not?

I'm back on track now. Right. So in theory, any content management system, whatever technology it uses, builds pages on the fly and squirts them to the web browser. And as long as everything's working reasonably quick and on all things being equal, everything else is the same. It shouldn't really matter. What matters is that you use a system that you're comfortable with. Um, however, there is some evidence that the type of system that you're using can impact on search performance. And we still haven't got to the bottom of why? Yeah. And what we've seen is, and you know, right now I'm not even going to name it, but there's a certain content management system. And when sites are moved across to this content management system, their rankings increase. Even though, I mean, we've done like tests on them to say, well, are they super fast? Is that the reason they're not? They're not super fast. But we've seen on more than one occasion websites seriously improve how they're ranking in search simply by moving to this other content management system. And it's a puzzle. I don't really.

Understand what's.

Going on there.

Um, but.

In theory, it doesn't really matter. What I would say is if you, you know, pick a system that's well supported. I mean, I don't like WordPress, but if you're going to build a website, you know, you're in the budget isn't massive or whatever, and you just want to go for like a, you know, buy a template, customise it and get a website up there and use WordPress. That's great. That's a good choice because there are squillions of WordPress.

Developers out there. You'll always find somebody. I built my own. When I had my own business, I built my website on WordPress and if I ran into trouble, it was really, really easy to find someone to help me. Yeah. Um, most, you know.

Good communities as well. There's a good online community for these things.

Yeah. You can.

It's somewhat somewhat similar with Joomla. It's definitely like that around I think Shopify, HubSpot, the commercial ones, the commercial ones, the SaaS ones. Yeah. The benefit of those is that like the people who sold you it are hosting it and looking after it for you. So you can say, hey, why is this not working? Can you help me with this? Yeah.

So with WordPress and Joomla, you download them for free off the internet. So they're not obliged to sort of give you any support. But.

Um, but there are systems out there that some agencies champion. Oh yeah. We use, you know, concrete CMS. It's like, it's probably a perfectly good CMS, but if you fall out with that agency or they go kaput, then you're going out into the marketplace. Suddenly there's only like three agencies in the UK do it. And so you're going to be paying higher prices because they're in demand, because nobody else uses.

That capacity.

Or they don't have the capacity to take you on. So yeah, I mean, sticking with fairly well known mainstream systems makes sense. These are the systems that are getting constantly evolved, developed, improved. There's a good community of support. There's a lot of agencies will be able to help you if you if you come unstuck, that kind of thing.

Um, plugins, that's an interesting one.

Okay.

Because I've used WordPress, I've used Joomla, I've used HubSpot, um, WordPress and Joomla have like plugins that are, that give you some extra additional functionality.

They all.

Do. Um, and sometimes, but they're built by people who didn't make, you know, they built by external developers. And some of them are great and some of them are absolutely terrible.

Yeah.

For sure. Um, and you can come into all sorts of problems by picking the wrong one.

Yes. But that's also the same in the paid ecosystem of Shopify we've come across.

Oh, that's right.

Shopify add ons. So basically an add on, you know, with a content management system, whether it's Shopify, HubSpot, Joomla, WordPress, any of these things, you've got the core system, and then there's no point trying to make these core systems do everything. So the core system does all the essential stuff. And then if you need, for example, um, a document repository, always careful when I say that word. If you need a document repository then you get what's called a plugin. So with Joomla for example, it's called document. So we add on doc man. We plug in doc man to the CMS. It seamlessly plugs in. It doesn't doc man doesn't work on its own. It needs to be plugged into something. It plugs into Joomla. And so so you suddenly you've got a document library functionality function on your website by, by, by extending the um, functionality, if you like, of.

CMS with something that the original HubSpot.

Does Shopify do with Shopify. It's an interesting one because you can start off with Shopify and you're like, oh, it's thirty quid a month. Great. I've got my shop online and I'm thirty quid a month. Oh, but I need this type of shipping and I need that type of thing.

And suddenly they're.

All like, well, that's an extra fifteen quid a month. That's an extra twenty quid a month. And suddenly you're.

Paying.

Hundred.

And.

fifty quid a month.

For it. There's a lot of things that a lot of people are going to need, and they're not built into the basic one. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I think with with those plug ins, you've got to kind of read the reviews. You've got to probably go for something that you're at least paying a little bit. Try and avoid completely free ones unless they've got really good support. Because if you get the free ones, you probably don't get the support. And if it breaks, then there's not an awful lot you can do. Um, and I think you have to watch out for updates and things with those, but yeah. Yeah, I'm quite careful.

That's a really good point you raised there. Um, updates. So if you go down the WordPress Joomla type route, Drupal craft, any of these systems, then you're basically putting it on a server or you're paying somebody to put it on a server and it needs to be kept up to date. So WordPress updates, you can sometimes go through phases with WordPress where there's an update every week. Now quite often you just press a button and it updates, no problem. But sometimes you press the button and it updates and breaks. So suddenly you're like, oh, okay, I just broke my website. Where do I go now that if you if you contrast that with the SaaS systems, it's not your problem. It's like HubSpot.

Keep it up.

Shopify, BigCommerce.

Yeah.

They're provided software as a service. So you're just using the platform.

It's always up to date. You don't have to go in the back end. And there's a big button saying it's out of date, you need to do something. And you're like, oh no, oh no.

It's the only time that you can come unstuck with us is if if they rely heavily on like Amazon Web Services, AWS. Yeah, you know, quite often are used by some of these big platforms because AWS is huge. It did. So basically, I think it might have been with Shopify affected by that, I can't remember. I think they.

Might have been, um, was it Shopify that went down or, or Spotify went down, go down.

Spotify as well? I think I usually say Spotify. I mean, Shopify.

There was, there was loads of big sites went down or some kind of Twitter goes down or.

You're kind of in, in the, you know, you're in a situation that millions of people are in. If that happens, it's not like, you know, like you're all on your own and your website's gone down and you're like, help!

No. It's people understand. It's like, well, it's just one of those things. Like half the websites in the world have gone down and, you know, give it a couple of hours, it'll all be fine again.

That's right. Mhm. Okay. Um.

So yeah, there's, there's lots of, there's lots of bits that you have to think about, you know, when you're going, well, you know, I want this, I want that. Just think about all the sort of support and the plug ins and the availability of people to dig you out of holes. If you get into one.

one thing that's of interest is that a lot of people like is the idea of having a staging server. So if you've well, let's just rewind slightly. If you run a WordPress Joomla website, then best practice dictates that you don't update the live website. Yeah. You update a separate website, which is where you do all your edits, all your updates, and then that's your staging server if you like. And then when you're happy with that, you then press a button and that becomes the live website. That's ideal.

Check what it looks like before you let everyone else see it.

Some systems. I think maybe Sitecore and systems like that, some of the big, scary, expensive systems, they have version control built into them. So you can actually update the site and then send it to somebody for approval and they can go, yeah, that's fine. And then they can publish it, for example. But a way around that is to build a dev stack with a staging server. We do that for a few clients. So they've got one client, you know, they came to us with a WordPress site that was in a right mess. We sorted it all out, but it was pretty obvious that if we just gave it back to them, even though we were, then they would break it again. So what we did is we they said, look, we can we get something that's a bit safer. So we created a dev stack. So they, they edit dev dot and do all of their edits. And we give them a big red button, which they can go to. And when they're happy, they press a big red button and it makes everything that's in dev dot on on the live website copies. It just does everything in the background. Website doesn't go down at all. It does everything. I think we use Docker for doing it. So it's all done in the background and that just happens. And that's working really well for them because they can actually break the dev site. They can install a plugin that breaks the website. Oh, we've broken it. It's fine. It's just a dev site. Yeah. Also the live website. We can remove all of the facilities that are there for, uh, updating it, editing it, etc. so we can make it more secure.

I was going to say that.

It.

Right down because, because if the client can't get into the back end, then presumably it's much harder for any sort of hacker to get into the back end.

Exactly. Yeah. Because the files and the, and the ways that they know how to hack websites, they've gone because we've removed them. They're not needed.

Often the, the people think they've been hacked and actually someone's actually just got, got hold of the username and password and used it kind of quite sort of. Yeah. Um, you know, almost not legitimately, but they haven't hacked in. They've just found a way in. Um, if that doesn't exist then it's obviously going to be more secure.

Absolutely. I mean, you can also, if you, if you have to have a website where you're editing the live website using a web interface, logging in like you do at your online banking, for example, you can, you can bolt that down using belt and braces so that it's very difficult for anybody to get in amongst it. I think the only compromise we ever had, uh, and the client jumped up and down a little bit and said, oh, you know, our website's been hacked. How is this possibly happened? But actually what had happened is that the person, one of a member of their team, their username and password had been compromised.

That was that's how.

They got into the website. Well, they logged in.

They didn't.

Hack.

They just got hold of a of a legitimate username and password and used it to get in. So it's a data breach rather than a hack.

Yeah. That's right.

A data breach at their end. The the website wasn't compromised at all. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, the way that we, we, I mean, quite often with our clients, we are, we build the site and it's our responsibility to grow the grow the traffic, get the leads, do the whole nine yards for them. When we do that, we, we leave the site in what's called a repo. So we, we develop locally. And then that goes into a repo. We use GitHub. And then we used um we use a tool for deploying to the live server. So we never ever edit live websites. We never edit production servers. And in that way Again, we lock things down, but that dev stack we've got is great, but you need to be a bit of a geek to use it. So what we do is when we have clients who really want to update their website and, um, but we want to get that level of security and assurance that they're not going to break it. Then, then we set that, that dev site.

The.

Stack.

A big red button, the.

Big red button. And it literally is, you know, it's like a, it's a, it's a password protected super secret web page that's got a big button on it. And then right. We're happy with it with dev. Press the button. And then five, five seconds later, the live website's been updated.

Yeah, it's much, much safer.

And it's kept them safe. It's kept the website spinning and everything running perfectly as it should.

Yeah. And stops them getting into too much of a pickle with it.

Okay. Um, kind of just winding things up a little bit. Um, people used to think that websites were the realm of the IT department. I mean, whenever we went to speak to businesses about their website, oh well, of course we've got the IT people involved and, and it used to just oh, for Christ's sake.

Because it really has nothing. No, it's.

Got nothing to do with.

That. None of it. I mean, the servers might have something to do with the IT department, but. But you don't host your website on your own server anymore. Those days are long gone.

I think there once was, I think quite a long time ago, there was an IT expert who was also a good communicator, I think. I think I think he's dead now. I don't think he's I think he's gone. But that's the only instance I've ever come across of that being.

The website is your number one marketing tool, and you have to put the marketing people in charge. Also, don't put the most junior person in the office in charge just because they know more about like the internet than you. Doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. You don't have to understand the technology. You have to understand your customers and know what your customers want to see. And that is the number one thing. So the person that understands the customers and the messaging and your image and your brand, that's the person that should be in charge of your website. Yeah. And that's a person who probably should have the most say on what the back end should look like how they want to update it, because they're the person that's going to be in charge of, of keeping it up to date and, and making sure that it, it stays on brand and doesn't get messed up and, and is easy to keep kind of bang up to date. So that's the person that should have the most say.

Yeah. I mean, sometimes here at red Evo, um, all of the non-geeks like you, me are flat out working on websites and the devs have actually got a bit of time on their hands, you know, they're actually doing some, you know, doing, going, go, doing some online learning or learning a new system or doing some stuff because like their work is done, they've handed the thing over to the communicators. Yeah. And that's really what content management systems were brought about for. Yeah. Just to kind of finally get the website out of the grubby mitts of the IT department and give the website to the communicators.

Who should be running it. Yeah. And, um, and making sure that they, they find it easy to, to keep it up to date and developer and make it grow. Because if that's difficult, then it's less likely to happen.

Mhm. Mhm. Okay. Um, I'm really quite surprised at how, how much we've managed to bang on about content management systems.

Yeah, I know. I thought it was going to be a ten minute podcast when we started, but there you go.

Did you learn anything?

Yeah, I think I did, yeah. Yeah it is. I mean, it's, it's complicated and it's complicated if you want it to be.

But isn't there a film called It's Complicated? There is. Yeah.

With Alec.

Alec. Oh, we don't mention his name anymore, do we? Isn't he in it? Who? Alec Baldwin. Alec Baldwin.

Oh. Oh, God.

He's persona non persona non grata now, isn't he? Yeah. Are we allowed to say that? We just did. Um. Right.

So anyway, yeah.

This is um Dave and Julie on Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Um, if you've got some opinions, if you've got something that you want to talk about in the area of digital marketing or business growth or just kind of anything related to business, digital, even digital transformation, anything like that, or marketing or marketing related. Exactly that. Go to https://www.redevolution.com/digital-marketing-from-the-coalface, the site, our dedicated podcast site, or redevolution.com. If you want to contact us through our website, drop us a line and, um, let us, let us know we did actually get approached by a podcast booking agent, didn't we? So we've got a guest coming on a guy from the States. I think that's going to be quite interesting.

Yeah, we got a different point of view, different angle on that.

Yeah. We've also got pencilled in a podcast, um, with somebody I'm not going to name drop at the moment. Um, but I'm really looking forward to it. It's going to be about business storytelling and, and this guy's the master.

I've seen him speak and he's great. Yeah.

And he's coming, he's coming on the show. So I'm really looking forward to that. Really enjoyed the last one we did with Elliott. I thought that was great. The, the video, the whole video strategy approach, that strategic approach to video.

I haven't listened to.

That one as well. So, you know, if you're working in, you know, even in ancillary areas of digital marketing, digital transformation, anything like that, then as far as we're concerned, you're probably going to be a good person to come on and talk.

Yeah. Give it a nice break from the Dave, Alex and Dave show. And you know, give us a bit of variety. It'd be lovely to to have some more guests on.

Yeah. In fact, um, Dave Marshall, the other Dave, everyone's called Dave. If you've, if you're male and you work at Revolution, you call Dave, Dave Marshalls actually working on some stuff just now. Um, that I think I'm going to get into. Come on and talk about. It's to do with content management systems. But yeah, I think it'll be quite interesting. Um, you know, I think it'll probably be a probably, you know, a minute, a minute and a half podcast, the shortest one we've ever done, but.

Definitely a geekier one.

He's grinning.

Okay.

All right. So, um, that's us for now. Hope you've enjoyed it. Look forward to doing the next one. If you want to come on the show, you know what to do. Bye. From me.

Thank you.