A colleague of mine popped by today to ask my advice on mobilising content management systems (“CMS”). His company has a really old, creaking CMS that they’re utterly delighted with. It works fine, they don’t want to change it, everything is perfect. The only thing it doesn’t do is ‘mobile’. It doesn’t recognise iPads, iPhones, BlackBerries or so on. It just feeds the full web experience to everybody.
Now, it’s possible for them to upgrade to a different CMS — but that’s going to be serious, serious effort.
Are there any other solutions that you can ‘bolt on’ to mobilise their site? That was the question.
My immediate response was ‘yeah, I’m sure something like Mippin would do this from your RSS feeds’.
Having had a quick look again at the Mippin site, it looks precisely like the sort of thing they’d be able to help with. I especially like the fact they’ll give you a native app on each platform for £500 each too.
However I wondered what else is out there. Have you come across anything I should recommend to this chap?
Was just answering a similar question on a call a few min ago:
urmobile.com, shoutem.com, mobify.me, taptu, and coundit mobile have solutions that are similar in this space. All require about the same amount of work, but have different feature sets and such.
I’ve been using Mobify.me for a number of years (m.mobileministrymagazine.com) and like it a good bit.
Your friend might also want to take a look at some of the trends/happenings in the subject of responsive web design. Whereas the noted companies will help short term, the work and thinking behind the responsive web design movement is something to consider when his company looks to redo templates and such.
Q1: What’s driving this?
Q2: What’s the budget?
If they just want to present something more appropriate for mobile users, a mobile-formatting intermediary may do the business. But if the driver turns out to be something more comprehensive, then +1 for a responsive redesign, and an overhaul that presents a consistently experienced site across a variety of devices.
Changing the CMS is a different matter, but if it’s old and creaking, it’s probably got a load of security holes that will eventually bite them in the arse.
I get the impression they just want to press a button and have it fixed for say 12 months before coming back to it and fixing it fully with a CMS overhaul.
Thanks for this Ronan!
Super suggestions Antoine!