People normally use the term replatforming to mean moving from from one platform to another, right?
So give me an example.
WordPress to Magento or Joomla to WordPress.
Companies have a presence online, so when people go looking in Google, they might find company A, company B, company C. If the company has got a presence, then their website is being viewed. And then there are things to do when you're rebuilding replatforming your website to make sure you don't break that.
So this is a really interesting point because I think it's in trying to understand when it's time to rebuild the website.
Yeah. I mean, the usual one, when a website needs rebuilding is either the company needs to update its whole aesthetic. Quite often older websites are not mobile phone tablet friendly, so they're not what we call responsive. And I guess content management systems are evolving. So sometimes the platform that's been chosen is out of date.
So I think that's quite an interesting idea, really, isn't it? That sometimes it's easier just to kind of rip the the floor out and start again, as it were, rather than trying to kind of keep tweaking and iterating.
Ah, right. So Monday morning recording podcasts, it's not easy, is it? It's might take, it might do, it might take a little while to get going on this one. But, uh, subject today is, uh, Alex go on, say it.
I'm gonna say Replatforming.
Oh, no, not replatforming. You mean building a new website.
Basically, or migrating from one site to. Yeah. So normally, I guess for a little bit of background, people normally use the term replatforming to mean moving from one.
Um, nobody uses the term replatforming to.
It's Monday morning. It's going to be long and arduous. It will be a coalface, a literal coalface. Yeah. Yeah. No, to move from one platform to another. Right. So, so.
Give me an example.
WordPress to Magento say, or Joomla to WordPress or WordPress. Joomla. Okay.
What's Magento? I know what it is. I know what it is, but I know a lot of people don't.
Yeah. I mean, I think it's called Adobe Commerce now actually, isn't it?
Is it called Adobe Commerce? Oh really? Oh, Adobe bought it. Okay. So it's an e-commerce platform a bit like, uh, don't say Shopify. No, say Shopify. Don't say Spotify. David. I always say Spotify when I mean Shopify. So it's basically for building online shops. Okay, so you might have previously used WordPress well-known content management system with WooCommerce, which is a funny name, but it's just a plugin for WordPress that lets you build an e-commerce website. Um, or so you might be on that and you're going to move to Magento, or you might be using WordPress for your website and you decide to rebuild it using craft or Joomla or Drupal or God. There's hundreds of them in there.
So there is literally thousands. And I think this is, I guess, the, the driving force behind this podcast, right? It's confusing for a lot of people. They inherit a website or they are promoted within an organisation and they're suddenly responsible for this website. And the first thing you have to decide is, is the technology I've inherited still fit for purpose. Can I use it? Yeah. Is the website okay?
Well, isn't it normally the case that nearly always the technology is fit for purpose? And as Julie said earlier, when we were chatting about this, like a new marketing manager arrives and decides that because they've used WordPress in the past, they want to dump Joomla or Drupal or whatever, whatever content management system they're using and use WordPress instead because they like it.
So I think there's the comfort angle. And then I think there's the FOMO angle, right? Fear of missing out.
I'm letting you off with that one. I'm letting you off with that. I'm not even going to pick you up on oh no, I'm about four more. Come on.
That was, uh, ageist of me to assume that you would know that I knew. Um, but no. So yeah, I think there's that angle as well. You know, people have heard about this all singing, all dancing platform that can do everything better and they have to have it, you know? Yeah. Um, certainly, I guess in e-commerce more than B2B people are mad about this stuff, you know, oh, it does this, it does X, Y, and Z. So we have to have it. Otherwise our business can't grow. Yeah. And I think that's, you know, partly very good marketing on the part of people who make these platforms. I agree. Um, but also, I guess, you know, something that people really do have to contend with is, is kind of trying to figure out whether or not they need those extra features or whether it's really.
I hope nobody plays this podcast on like one and a half times speed, because the speed you were talking there would mean one and a half times would make it completely inaudible. I can.
Endeavour to speak slow. I'm the.
Worst. I'm the person who always speaks too fast. I get that. I mean, I get told that all the time, so I'm just, um. You're just hearing myself in you, I think. Yeah. I don't want you to start parroting me and talking as fast as me because that means. Well, it goes to me. The podcasts are over really quick, which some people might think that's a good thing. Lots of great information in five minutes instead of forty five minutes.
Quick brain dump. Yeah. Um, but no. Yeah. So I think that's basically that's the thing, isn't it? People kind of take charge of a marketing department or whatever they think is my website. Okay. Do I need these fancy new things, you know, or like you say, they're going for it because it's safe for them. They're familiar with it and they don't like-
And that's not necessarily a bad thing. The fact that if somebody has used, say, WordPress for a long, long time and they can make it sing and dance, they know exactly where they're at, they're at with it, and then they take on a job. And maybe the website needs rebuilding anyway. So like, well, why wouldn't you rebuild it using a tool that you really like? I get that. I mean, we've got a number of clients who use WordPress and we've, uh, you know, we manage a number of WordPress websites for clients. It's not the tool we would choose to use if we were building from scratch, but we, we have had to do that because the customer was really sold on the idea of sticking with or moving to the WordPress platform. I mean, the devs don't like it that much. It's kind of, but it's only a lot of it's down to personal preference. I mean, people talk about WordPress and say it's a lot easier to use than, say, our preferred tool of choice, which is Joomla. Um, and, but I mean, the ultimate thing is with any system, Drupal Joomla aircraft. They all basically squirt HTML to the web browser, so they all squirt HTML from the server to, you know, Google Chrome or whatever it is you're using for your web browser. And some people use Safari and all those other browsers. And I think annoyingly, some people still use Internet Explorer. But yeah, that's right. I just saw a developer pass out in the corner of the office when I mentioned Internet Explorer then, but, um, so, but ultimately they all do the same thing, don't they? They all, they all do that. So it's really to do with the back end management side of it that makes your life easier or otherwise.
So I guess that's an interesting point because I guess coming more from the marketing end and not having your background in kind of coding development, that kind of thing. I guess my question is, do they all do the same thing? Because you'd think from the way they're marketed, that some of them are literally incapable of doing some of the things that say WordPress can do, but that's not really the case then.
No, usually you can bend them and make them do what you need to do. I guess it's the ease with which you make them do. I mean, you know, Joomla is our tool of choice for content management. Um, well, unless we're doing e-commerce when we use, uh, wait for Shopify. Yeah. We don't use Spotify for e-commerce. We use Shopify. Um, but it's our tool of choice. Joomla. Because we've never found it wanting. When a client said, oh, I need a document management system in my website yet there's one of those, you know, when a client said, oh, I need a forum. Yep, there's one of those. I need an event calendar. Yep, there's one of those. And we don't have to reinvent the wheel or spend a lot of time and effort, i.e. money coding something. But with other systems that don't have off the shelf plugins to tick all these boxes, it's always possible to make it do it. And I guess for me, the thing is that people, and we've done it to a certain extent, people hang their hat on something and then try and make out that it's somehow better. But ultimately they're all very similar. It's just probably the speed with which you can achieve things depends on your familiarity with the system and the number of add ons that have been developed for that system. I mean, WordPress has got something like 10,000 available add ons. It might be more now last count.
So you can pretty much make you can.
Make it do whatever you want. Pretty much. That's right. I mean, there are people that argue that it's not very secure, that the way it does things leaves it wide open to people who can code badly to do exactly that and leave a website exposed, whereas some of the other platforms don't do that. They don't leave it open to that. But, um, I do think it really comes comes down ultimately to personal preference.
You did say something earlier though, that I think is quite interesting. Um, unless you said you also need to rebuild your website, right? Yep. So this is a really interesting point because I think it's in trying to understand when it's time to rebuild a website or what it is that tells people, oh, you know, it's not just a case of replatforming and copy pasting the site onto a different platform, but actually my website's not fit for purpose anymore. And in kind of spotting those, I guess Jobs.
Yeah. I mean, the the usual one when a website needs rebuilding is either the company needs to update its whole aesthetic. It just kind of is looking dated. Um, quite often older websites are not mobile phone tablet friendly, so they're not what we call responsive. They don't respond to whatever platform people are using to view them. And that's a big one. Um, and I guess content management systems, the tools we use to build websites are, are evolving, constantly evolving. So sometimes the platform that's been chosen is out of date. You can no longer keep it secure, update the software, etc.. So there's another reason there. Um, but I think, I don't know, I think for the most part, uh, when you're completely rebuilding the website, it can be down to the platform being out of date, but it's quite often just kind of time for a change almost.
So I think that's quite an interesting idea really, isn't it? That sometimes it's easy just to kind of rip the the floor out and start again, as it were, rather than trying to kind of keep tweaking and iterating. Because I'm sure I know for a fact there are clients that have come to us with very outdated websites. And we've literally just said, you know, let's start from scratch. Yeah, let's start again.
Well, yeah, as well as that, we had a client recently who came to us with a brand new website, which absolutely wasn't fit for purpose. It wasn't the website they needed. Now, although it was built on a really good content management system craft. Mhm. Which is a great system. We don't have really any expertise around craft. So we had the discussion with them. Well, either we need to learn to use that system, and then we'll rebuild the site and make it do what we need it to do. But if we're going to do all that anyway, do you mind if we rebuild it using a different tool? As it turns out, it was a tool that they'd used previously that they were familiar with, so they were quite happy for us to do that. So I think, um, it's, it is the case that we get old sites, which are a bit crap now and need rebuilding for lots of reasons and then, but equally, as I say, very recently we rebuilt a site that was literally two or three months old because it was just it was, you know, superficially it was quite pretty, but it absolutely wasn't the site they needed to help them grow their business.
Yeah.
So if we're going to look at, um, Replatforming, as you call it, um, I've never called it that before. But anyway, we'll call it replatforming just, um, just for now, just.
To make me.
Happy. Yeah. To make you happy. If we're gonna, if we're going to call it that, then there are some things to look out for. So if you're going to rebuild your website, you need to make sure that you don't, um, break your, can I say digital footprint? AM I allowed to say that?
No, I think that sounds a little bit. Where's the ruler?
It does a little. It sounds.
A.
Little bit. Yeah.
What do you mean by digital footprint?
Okay. So like we companies have a presence online. So when people go looking in Google, they might find company A, company B, company C. So if company, if the company has got a presence and they are being found and their website is being viewed. And, you know, you obviously look at the stats and decide whether or not that's happening. Then there are things to do and things to not do. I guess when you're rebuilding replatforming your website to make sure you don't break that.
And I guess a really basic example of that would be going back to the client that you were just talking about that moved from Joomla to craft and then back to Joomla again, right? Because in that initial move, they asked a lot of their content, right? They did. So suddenly you're kind of thirty, forty, fifty page website goes to five or six pages.
And they had some good search rankings. I mean, you know, our approach meant that we've managed to get those rankings back, at least some of them. We managed to resurrect it, even though the website had the original website that they axed had been offline for about eight months. We managed to, um, you know, bring.
It.
Back to life. Yeah. Use our brilliance and expertise to bring it back to life.
And Dave with a pair of paddles.
That's right.
Please come back.
So. So we did. You're right. Um, but that could have been avoided. Yes. I mean, in essence, it's really quite simple. But basically, if you're just changing the platform and I'll say why I'm why I'm saying just changing the platform in a minute. If you're just changing the platform that it's on so that the individual pages on the site maybe have a slightly different address. And by address, I mean like, you know, red evolution dot com forward slash what is SEO might change to red evolution dot com forward slash. Please explain SEO. So it might be exactly the same content, but now it's got a different address, a different URL. That's right. So we just need to make sure we go through an exercise which is called a three oh one exercise. You know, where we tell Google that that page was this and it's now this, and you just need to do that really for pretty much all your content. We've got, we've got a project on just now for a customer and they've bought another business. And that other business has got something like four or five hundred pages on its website. Uh, some of them have rankings. They're not brilliant rankings, to be honest, but it's.
Still.
There. They're there. So we're now going through this quite extensive exercise with them as they want to, um, sunset the old website. Stop laughing at me. I quite.
Like that.
They want to wind the old website down and but we want to make sure that they, that they, the website, their main website benefits from that old website as we wind it down. So we're basically saying to Google was this page, now it's this page was this page, now it's this page. It's like three oh one exercise. And that's pretty straightforward to do. And it's a lot of businesses miss it.
Yeah. And I guess it's also worth pointing out, I guess, to people who maybe aren't so kind of into SEO and that another reason for doing that is even if the page doesn't rank particularly well, um, one of the key things in SEO is also obviously kind of gaining citations or links to your website. And what you don't want to do is take a page that has historically been linked to by other people and just ditch it, because then you lose all of that.
Exactly.
We call it link juice, which I always think sounds kind of vaguely disturbing. Um.
You know, said something else.
A little bit gross. Um, but, um, yeah, the idea is obviously that that link is, is kind of passing authority through your site. And if you access the page that it's pointing to, you lose all that authority.
That's right. Yeah. I was listening to a podcast, uh, I think it was the guys at Target Internet. I think it's a great podcast. I was listening to their podcast and they were talking about this, uh, only the only yesterday, I think when I was out and about and I was listening to a podcast, uh, and they were talking about exactly that. I mean, they were talking about like auditing all your backlinks, seeing where those backlinks link to, and then making sure that you three are on now that's fine. And that works great. But if you actually do the three hundred and one exercise properly, you're actually gonna, you're gonna redirect, tell Google that this page is now this page over and over again for pretty much all your pages.
Yeah, I think.
Anyway, so you should catch those, those links that were linking to page A, which now link to page B kind of thing.
Um, so if you're replatforming and you do the three hundred one exercise correctly, everything is absolutely fine.
Yeah, it should be. I mean, there's no, there's no real reason why not. And that leads us on to another reason for Replatforming. And we've done this a number of times recently, is where businesses decide that their domain name. Yes, a domain name like our domain name is Red evolution dot com. So their domain name is no longer fit for purpose. And they want to either either they've rebranded or they've managed to get hold of the dot com version where they only use the dot co dot UK. Or maybe they had like Acme, hyphen engineering dot co dot UK, and they've now managed to get Acme engineering dot co dot UK without the hyphen. For whatever reason.
I always like hyphens in web address. You do, I do. I think it makes them easier to read.
Yeah, I guess it does. And I guess it's less important now. I mean, my only concern with them is like word of mouth. Yeah. Oh yeah. Go to our website. It's we hyphen maik hyphen hyphen websites hyphen for hyphen u hyphen dot com hyphen. Yeah, that's kind of drives me mad, but it's like extreme example, I realise, but, um, when you actually replatform and change the domain name, then it's slightly more involved, but it's more or less the same as in, hey Google it was this. It's now this and using Google Search Console, you can even tell Google we are moving to this new domain name. And Google will go and check and it'll look for these three or ones, these redirects, and it will come back and say, yeah, it looks like you've done all the three ones. All good. Leave it to it. Leave it with us. It'll take us a couple of weeks. And when we've done those exercises, then we do often see a rather worrying drop off in traffic and rankings and things until Google does its jiggery pokery and it all comes back again. I mean, we've never done one where the rankings disappeared and never came back. I mean, if you do it properly, Google is trying to help you as much as it can, and it will help you to make sure that doesn't happen.
Yeah, because I think that's one of the things that's maybe most intimidating about it. I mean, certainly coming from the SEO side of things is that Google, you know, it doesn't tell you that you've done stuff wrong, though, does it? That's the thing. The kicker is that if you mess up your three hundred and one redirects or something goes wrong somewhere along the way.
Well, if Google tells you what you've done wrong, it's admitting it's telling you inadvertently what it's doing, and it's always trying to be a bit cloak and dagger. Yeah, just build a great website, guys. Build it, put content in that people are looking for and the rest will all happen. That's what they want. They don't want you to try and unpick what's really going on.
Yeah. Because but I think that's one of the things that is, I guess, like I say, most intimidating about the whole thing, right? I remember once having a client who said to me, you know, we want to move from this platform to the next platform. Can you guarantee will you sign a contract so we won't lose any rankings? And of course, you know, however good you are at SEO Digital marketing, you cannot put pen to paper on that. You cannot guarantee because we don't control Google. Right? So there's always that element of the unknown. I guess that is that is there. But yeah, I mean you so you don't think that should put people off though necessarily.
No, not at all. We've done it lots of times and we did. We do it well. We did it ourselves. I mean back in Crikey two thousand and six we were called Scott web dot com, which we realised was not the right name.
For an internet. In two thousand and six.
There was an internet. In two thousand and six, there was an internet in nineteen ninety six as well. There was actually an internet in nineteen sixty nine, I think, called Arpanet. If you go back all that, all the way back, something like that anyway. Um, but yeah.
And you were involved in that.
I realised what you're doing there. I'm not going to take the bit. Um, there was, and we changed from, uh, Scott web dot com to read evolution when we rebranded as read evolution back in two thousand and six. So yeah, we did it ourselves. We've done it for a lot of clients. We did it. Um, you know, for, uh, the IT company that we help. Alto. Yes. You know, they were alto dot tech, uh, which was okay, but I'm always a bit skeptical about these funky domains. And, you know, we changed them to, you know, alto dot com and that all went well. I mean, it's less risky when a website doesn't have lots of great rankings anyway. Yeah. You know, like, you know, that has happened where we're taking on a customer and they just haven't done digital marketing particularly well over the years. They haven't embraced it. And that's a great time to do the domain change and everything because you're not actually risking anything.
So there is a value, I guess to, yeah, if you're starting out and you're thinking now is the time to kind of sharpen up our, What did you call it? A digital footprint. Digital footprint. If you want to do any kind of replatforming, if you want to update your website, if you want to switch domains, do it before you start the marketing.
That's right. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, going, going back then, I mean, there's no danger. Done properly, there's no danger. Changing platforms I think. I think the only danger is if it's done for the wrong reasons. I mean, I do hear, uh, recently had a conversation and somebody was trying to tell me that the content management system we use, which as per all content management systems, basically squirts HTML back at a web browser. But they were trying to tell me that either it it negatively impacted rankings or it wasn't good for SEO or s e o optimisation, which whatever that is. Uh, so I am a bit skeptical if, if people want to replatform because they've been told that the platform that they're using is somehow the reason that they're not getting good leads and generating business from their the website because it nearly always. Well, no, it never is.
It's always rubbish, right? Because this is one of the things I think this is one of the most persistent and irritating rumors that I hear. You know, obviously we're a kind of web design and digital marketing agency and we make websites. So yes we are.
I'm in the wrong. I'm in the.
Wrong.
Office. Sorry.
By that is what we do. I'm pretty sure. Um, but no, it's um, you know, so it's, it's maybe a bit odd to sit here and talk about the, the kind of positives of something like squarespace, for example, but it's one of my least favorite and most enduring internet rumors, right? Is that if you build a website on squarespace, it's bad for SEO. I don't really know what that's supposed to mean. Um, but these rumors are kind of really persistent that some platforms are just inherently better than others for certain things.
Yeah, we've, I've heard it over the years. I've heard it from web development, web design companies who say, for example, web design company A, they can only build a website in WordPress. So they've got all of the straw man arguments sorted out so that they can make sure that they utterly persuade you that WordPress is the best platform. I mean, I, I just can't buy into that. I mean, you know, I've got to be honest, when we take on a new client, if they're using a content management system that we're not familiar with, then I'll have that conversation with them and I'll just say, look, we don't have expertise with this particular system, and we'll take a bit of a hit on rebuilding it in a system that we know, because that helps us. But I'm but not because the system you've got is no good. It's just that we'd like to work with you. We don't have expertise. And I don't think choosing an agency based on their expertise with a particular platform is a good enough reason to choose them. No, although I hate doing it because I kind of I feel like we're letting the client down. If we don't know the system, that's our problem. And you know, we will we will do our best to say, right, well, we'll learn it. Don't worry about it. We'll, we'll actually figure it out for you.
But I think that's the only alternative, isn't it, is to effectively learn on the job and the client's dime. And I always think that's a little bit like, I don't know.
Yeah. That's why you need that conversation. Yeah, yeah. But other agencies I've heard, and I don't like talking negatively about other agencies. Well, not in the podcast, obviously. I do all the time outside the podcast. Uh, but I don't like talking negative about other agencies because, but rather they, some of them do try and play that card. Yeah. I mean, they'll say, you know, oh yeah. You know, content management system X is no good for SEO and it's no good for this and no, no, no. But all they're really saying is like.
We don't know.
We need to rebuild it in WordPress because we don't know anything else. Yeah. And I hate having those conversations with customers. We do have them because sometimes, you know, we're going to do a load of digital marketing. We're going to do help a customer and really grow their business. So we need a platform that we can make sing and dance. And you know, why not choose that platform or choose a platform that you really know inside out? You know, it's the technical side of it is not going to hinder us in any way if we use HubSpot or if we use Joomla or if we use WordPress. If you want to stick with, for example, Drupal, which is quite a heavy duty, you know, takes a long time to learn it. Platform and it's a great platform. But if you want us to do it for you and you want us to use that software, there's going to be a bit of technical debt there. We're going to have to figure it out. And that's going to, you know, we're going to have to at least meet halfway on the cost of that.
Versus just like you say, letting you kind of rebuild it and something that we're comfortable with and that.
Yeah, but it's not always possible, is it? Because you think about the customer who just picked up down in Bristol, now they've got a website that's got something like four thousand pages. We're just not going to replatform it because they've got tons of content. So it would be a massive exercise. And that website has got a lot of back end stuff going on, which helps them run their business.
Because a lot of it's automated. Yeah, that's the problem.
So we've got to learn how to use that system. And luckily, you know, we've got a good relationship with the developer. So when we need it to do things it doesn't currently do, you know, the client knows that we're going to speak to the developer and say, hey, can you make it do this or that? We're not going to have to figure that out because it's a kind of closed system anyway.
And if they did come to us and say, you know, we want you to build us a brand new website. We would probably say you're better off sticking with the one you've got, right?
Possibly. Yeah. Although, I mean, in that case, what it actually does. Yeah. You know, it's okay, but what it actually does isn't that complicated. So if they want, you know, we could rebuild the website using an off the shelf content management system and build them the little bit of software they need that does the bit that the content management system they're currently using does, if that makes sense. Yeah. So yeah, it's a funny one. It is. Um, but going back to the idea that the content management system itself might or might not be the inhibitor to online success, better search rankings, better traction with customers, generating leads, enquiries, generating conversation, starting creating conversations. Very rarely. Very rarely is that the case because you can you can pretty much make any CMS do what it needs to do to make it like tick the boxes so that Google can index the site and do a number on it, you know, as in as in make sure that as in put it in the search results.
Yeah. And I think it's fair to say then, like you say, without talking badly about other agencies, that most of the time when people come to you and say you need to replatform for no reason, X, Y, or Z, it is probably simply to obscure the fact that they're not comfortable working with what you're working with now.
That's right. Probably. Yeah. That's right. Almost certainly the case. Um, we do sometimes pick up gigs where the platform is a platform we're familiar with, but it's hopelessly out of date. Right. Uh, you know, we had a customer come to us with a very outdated Joomla based website, and it hadn't been updated because someone had hacked about with the core system, which meant if you updated it, it would break. So, you know, sometimes it's, you know, sometimes there are complexities even when it's a platform that you're familiar with. And that's happened. I think that's probably happened to us with WordPress as well. It's not unusual for people to come to us with a WordPress website that's way out of date and potentially a security risk.
Because I'm right in thinking that WordPress release security patches kind of like every day, right?
It does it a lot. You can set it to automatically do it. And as long as it doesn't break itself when it does that automatic update, then all good. But um, yeah, I think, I think you're right. I think it does, it has to do most of them to be honest. I mean, it's um, I mean, there are systems out there that are not widely used that don't seem to have as many updates as, as others. I mean, there's a limitless supply of content management systems. Only a few get sort of really big traction. I mean, WordPress, I think most websites, the majority of websites are built with WordPress. Is that right? Is that am I saying that right? It's the most popular content management system on the net, isn't it? WordPress. Yeah. You know, it's something thirty, forty percent. Whereas our preferred platform, Joomla is tiny, two, three percent still a lot of websites. Um, and then you've got, you know, craft and all the other ones that, that are, and some of them get an almost, uh, they kind of somehow I think it's part of the marketing. They get like a mystique about them.
Yeah. I was just gonna say it's really interesting, isn't it? Because like, I obviously I'm not a developer, not a coder from the outside looking in. It seems really strange to me that there can be so many different ones. You know, like take something like cars, for example. There's a very limited number of manufacturers because very quickly, you know, you realise these are the manufacturers people trust and that's why everyone's going to buy their car. But like you say, almost limitless numbers of cms's. And I don't know quite how they're managing to, you know, stay afloat and grab, you.
Know, a lot of them are created by people who say, you know, they use a content management system and they realise all the good bits and the bad bits and they go, hey, you know what? We're going to rebuild. I mean, when I started read evolution, when I left the previous agency I worked for, I started read evolution. And one of the reasons I was starting read Evo was to develop a content management system from scratch. I'd done it within the agency because there weren't many content management systems around going back now, sort of two thousand and one, two thousand and two. Um, and then I thought, well, I'll do some research before I actually start out to create, you know, learning the lessons I've learned and found, um, what was then called mambo. Um, and then it very soon after became known as Joomla as it kind of. Well, the project forked. There was Mambo still exist. Joomla! The guys said, what? We can do better than that and let's call it something else. Um. I quickly realised that me trying to re trying to create one was was silly. But we do still see that we do still see people that are like using a specific agency's own content management system. You see it less now. Yeah. But you used to see it quite a lot. And, and a bit like the mystique around some of the other sort of slightly funkier systems, you know, it's like, oh yeah, well, of course we've built our own system, which is way better than what is way better than Joomla and WordPress that are developed by professional developers all over the world, tested by thousands of companies, and have thousands of add ons. It's better than that. Is it?
So I think this is like because this is the whole thing with Magento, for example, isn't it? This is how all that started that it was kind of like the best e-commerce platform ever. And it had been built from scratch for e-commerce stores. And then it just turned out to be a kind of a big, slow, clunky mess, really.
But yeah, I mean, it's something we've doubled and touched Magento sites over the years, but we've always held back from actually going all in and saying, right, let's really learn this platform. Maybe we should have in some respects, because it's a platform that needs good developers. And there's no there's there's a shortage of people who've got real Magento expertise. I think.
Then again, dealing with our client base, which is, you know, admittedly mainly B2B, it's probably much less kind of there's no point to it really is there. At the end of the day, those are features that we don't really need to help people grow their businesses. That's right. And I'd like to think that's probably why we mainly recommend Joomla, right? Because it does the job that we need it to do.
And yeah, and we know it inside out. So yeah, it makes sense. Oh, Julie's handing me something here. Oh, right. Okay. Apparently this is a really good opportunity to mention HubSpot. And she makes a very good point. Yeah. Yeah.
HubSpot. Dave. What's HubSpot?
HubSpot is a fantastic platform for building websites, not just websites for customer relationship management systems and, and marketing automation. All right. So that's just loads of jargon. So basically. Uh, we use HubSpot where HubSpot, not only HubSpot.
We do like it despite the.
Sales pitch. We, we use HubSpot. So you can use HubSpot to build your website. And it's a, I guess you could say it's a bit like using Wix or Squarespace. It's a fully hosted platform, but it's integrated with marketing automation, which is effectively, if people fill a form and start sending them emails, if they show an interest in X, Y, or Z, and it's fully integrated with a customer relationship management system, which, you know, CRM, customer relationship management sounds a bit geeky, but it's basically just a way of making sure you understand, you know, first of all, who your customers are and what their, what their, what they need from you and helps you, you know, generate good dialogue with them and make sure you're delivering, you know, what they need.
It's dead clever. To be fair, I was really impressed with HubSpot the first time I ever logged into it. Literally, as soon as people fill in a form, you get a little pop up that tells you exactly who they are, what company they're from, you know, how many, how many pages on the website they've read. Where they came from, that kind of thing. Mhm. It is really interesting stuff. Um, I was going to make a point about HubSpot and I can't remember. Oh yeah. There we go. Um, so we were actually, I think I'm right in saying at one point you were discussing potentially rebuilding our site in HubSpot. Yeah. That was something that you certainly kind of thought about.
Certainly did. Yeah. And there's no reason not to do it other than we, we haven't really got the resource because we're busy working on client websites and things. It's a bit of an undertaking because I mean, our blog is in HubSpot. So, you know, when you're on our website, you click on the blog and then that's it. You go to blog dot com and you're in the HubSpot platform and we love it and we use it for that, and we use it for landing pages. So if we've got campaigns running in paid search, for example, uh, we'll send people to HubSpot landing page, which is, which is again, great, but going all in, um, partly we haven't got the resource to do it. And partly again, because we can really make Joomla sing and dance. Uh, we've tended to stick with it. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. I mean, even HubSpot, I mean, they don't massively push their content management system. You know, they fully accept that you can use their suite of tools without actually building your site in it. Um, if we were saying to customers, you really should buy HubSpot and build your website in it, and we weren't, then that's a bit tricky. I think like that wouldn't be a really good argument to try and to try and defend.
But it is interesting, isn't it, to think that going back to what we were saying earlier about the whole like features idea, you know, that some, um, cms's, some platforms are better than others because they have extra features nowadays when you can just kind of plug HubSpot onto any website, it kind of makes a lot of those extra features a bit redundant really. It's a little bit pointless as long as like you say it squirts some HTML code out there and you can see a web page.
That's right. Yeah, absolutely. So I think, um, you know, I think this whole idea of replatforming is a really interesting one. I would say that there's lots of motivations, lots of reasons for doing it. and whether it's just personal preference or, you know, the website's in a bit of a mess, so you're going to rebuild it. So build it with a tool that you like. And at the other end of the scale, there's people trying to make out that a platform or websites built with is no good. And that's the reason. And that's really, really the case these days. And it's certainly, in my opinion, it's very unlikely that if you're not killing it online and getting found in Google, generating enquiries, etc., that simply changing your platform is very unlikely, that that's going to have much of an impact unless, unless you've got a website that needs a geek to update it. So you say write some content, but it then has to be sent to a geek who will maybe get around to it in the next two or three weeks. Because let's face it, as we all know, to succeed online, you need to produce lots of content. You need to be able to write it, get it signed off, and get it live quickly. So if you've got a platform that doesn't allow you to do that, then, then yeah, maybe you should consider Replatforming for that reason as well.
Yeah. I mean, if every time I wrote a blog post, I had to go and bother Dave or Rob or somebody to put it online, it would get old for them and me pretty fast. So yeah, I guess that's the, the accessibility side is an important one. Yeah. But I think it's interesting, isn't it? Because when you're talking about a replatforming project, you're talking about kind of tens of thousands of pounds normally at least. Mhm. Or you could take that money and plow that straight into your actual digital marketing, right? And nine times out of ten, I think it's fair to say that would be the better option for people that are trying to replatform because they want to see growth, they want to grow their business, just spend that money on marketing instead. Right.
Mhm. Yeah.
Potentially probably make your pre-existing site do what you want it to.
Yeah. For sure. I mean, just, just to finish this off, I mean, one thing I would say, if you're a smaller business and you're trying to do this stuff in house, um, then if you're going to replatform, I would suggest using a platform like HubSpot or Wix because it's very user friendly, user friendly. Plus you don't have to host it and back it up and do all that. It's all, it's a software as a service SaaS, so you don't need any technical expertise to keep the thing spinning. So there's really good reason. Same with Shopify. I mean, if you use if you're going to do e-commerce, but you're a small business and you don't really have the money to use an agency or anything else, then platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, I mean, Wix and Squarespace and the like, you can built e-commerce onto them, I think. But you know, why not use a dedicated e-commerce platform? And then, you know, in that, in that sense, if you're gonna replatform because you need e-commerce, for example, or just because you've got a website that you can't update easily because it was built, you know, back when God wash your pants, um, then definitely use one of these SaaS SaaS platforms and then, you know, that's it. You don't need to worry about some of the other stuff that, uh, having an agency would, you know, you wouldn't, you wouldn't have to worry if you had an agency because they would take care of it. But obviously you've got that further expense.
You raise an interesting point, though. I'm aware of the fact you're trying to end the podcast prolonging it. But but you raise an interesting point. So like, you know, why is it then that people who are maybe have more budget, bigger company shouldn't be using those platforms? Like why isn't Adidas, for example, using Wix?
Well, you know what? I think if you go and look at some of these platforms, you would find some big brands that use them. There's certainly very big brands use Shopify. You know, there's and there's big brands, I believe there's big brands using squarespace, etc. there's no real reason. I mean, if again, to make them really sing and dance and to make them unique and to really go into the detail of a website design and make sure that it doesn't just look like you've bought a template for thirty bob and you're now live with your new website, then you do need expertise. I think I found an agency once that will build you a squarespace website. There's quite a few of them out there. That's their platform of choice. Like we've chosen to use Joomla and all power to them. Um, but you know, this is a platform that costs fifteen quid a month, but they still would want £2000, £3000 if they built it for you because they would.
Be just.
A drag. Yeah. Even though even though that's the case with the update interface. But you know, when it comes to the actual template, the look and feel of it, then I guess that's where they're adding, adding some more value. Um, but.
I guess you would always be quite limited by the functionality of something like squarespace, wouldn't you, if you had kind of any extra additional.
Yeah, it's probably extensible. If you've got the coding skills to do it, you can probably make it do other things. Or you could go to squarespace and say, look, we really need this. And they might turn around and say, yeah, you know, you're the one thousandth person this week who said that we're working on it. We realised we need to add that functionality. Like they didn't always have e-commerce functionality, but they have now. Yeah. And I'm sure, and they've got a booking calendar thing as well, because I think they realise lots of consultants were using it, and they wanted a way for those consultants to easily be able to put a calendar on so that people could book them for appointments and things. And I think they, I think they added that functionality on as well. So, I mean, ultimately, you know, most platforms can be used to good effect to help you grow your business. Um, you know, there's no particular one is going to make it massively better or quicker or, or anything else. Um, I mean, HubSpot might argue that their platform is pure and simply a platform for growth.
I mean, yeah, let's not get away from the fact that HubSpot isn't just about squirting HTML code at the internet, is it?
No, it's.
Not because it's that.
It's got a sales pipeline management tool. It's customer relationship management. It's got a whole suite of tools now that help you run your business online more effectively.
Yeah. And I don't want to go back to a world where when somebody fills in a contact form, I have to try and work out what their what company they've emailed me from by looking at the URL of their email, you know? That's right. There's a nice quality of life features to have for sure. But I guess, yeah, like you say, the fundamental point is it doesn't really matter which platform, just focus on growing your business. Really?
Yeah, I think so. And I think we'll use that as the way to conclude this fantastic podcast.