Crafting digital excellence with Craft CMS - Simon Leadbetter | E10

Crafting digital excellence with Craft CMS - Simon Leadbetter | E10 transcript

(Upbeat introduction music)

Charlotte White

Welcome to another episode of The Scaramanga Podcast. I'm Charlotte White. I'm the Social Media Assistant here at Scaramanga. Today I'm here with our Technical and Creative Director Simon Leadbetter, how are you doing?

Simon Leadbetter

I'm well, thank you.

Charlotte White

Brilliant, good to hear. Today we're talking about Craft CMS. First off, can you describe Craft to someone who's never heard of it before, or to someone like me, who doesn't know much about it at all!

Simon Leadbetter

I will do my best. So most websites are run by a content management system (CMS) and there are various out there and most people will have heard of the likes of WordPress, which is probably the most popular one out there, because it's a free open source platform. But there are many other content management systems out there that can be used, and Craft CMS is one of those platforms. We've been using it since its creation, and we find that it has many benefits, which we will get into in a minute.

Charlotte White

Perfect, well, that perfectly leads me on to my next question, because I was going to ask why... firstly, why Scaramanga choose it as opposed to any other CMS? But also what makes it different? I guess they're kind of the same question.

Simon Leadbetter

Right, so we use it because it's always good to have a specialism in one specific thing. So we know Craft CMS inside out, because we use it daily and develop websites on it on a daily basis. That means we can provide better levels support for our client rather than dispersing our knowledge across loads of different platforms, like WordPress and Drupal.

The other reason we use it is because of its rock solid security credentials. It's a it's a commercial CMS system so it's maintained by a full team of developers, whereas the open source systems are relying on other teams of volunteers often to maintain those platforms. And if you've got a team that's constantly developing the Craft CMS platform, then they're constantly reviewing the security metrics of it, as well as adding new features and making sure the platform is as good as it can be. And as I said, we've used it since its inception, which is quite a number of years ago.

So it's grown over those years into a really rock solid platform that the likes of the W3C have selected for their own website, because the other area that they're very strong on and as is Scaramanga is accessibility. They have worked really hard to make the Craft CMS platform itself, the control panel accessible. Often we talk about accessibility on the front end, but it's really important that the back end is accessible for users with additional needs.

Charlotte White

Can you give some specific examples of how they make it accessible?

Simon Leadbetter

Well, the first thing is is they they developed the W3C website on the Craft CMS platform and the team there have been working on improving all the hidden stuff, but everyday users that don't use assistive technology like voiceover, or NVDA, screen readers, they won't hear the improvements, but that's what they've done. They've done vast amounts in the background to make sure that Craft, if you use an assistive technology, is as usable for those users as it is for any other user.

So, lots of the stuff, as most things in accessibility, is almost invisible. But that's what they have done on the platform and they continue developing it. And they're developing it to meet the WCAG guidelines. So there's conformance criteria, and they're improving it to meet those criteria.

Charlotte White

Okay, cool. So, if someone was to use Craft for the first time, where would they start?

Simon Leadbetter

At the beginning, I guess. So, if you visit their website, they do actually have a demo site that you can use and experiment with but the thing that we really love about Craft is that its consistent and beautiful user interface; its a bit like riding a bike. Once you learn how to do one thing, like add an image, then that application is consistent across the whole platform. So whether you're reading an article or a page, the way that you interact with the site remains the same across across the Craft CMS platform. That consistency means that there is a shorter learning curve for any new user, because you learn it once and then it works the same way in a different section of the site.

But, as said, if you've never used it before, and you're curious, you can actually go to the CraftCMS.com website, and try an online demo, so you can play around with it. The benefit of doing that is that you get to experiment with image management, category management, content management, and you can just do it without having to have a developer to instal it for you. So that's a really good thing.

Just flipping back to some of the other good stuff that Craft offers, is that what we really like is its lack of reliance on plugins. So WordPress, and Drupal and platforms like that, there is a massive ecosystem where loads of developers create additional functionality for their platform. And, and its fast. And they are actually often the security vulnerabilities, because you're using a third party developer, whose skills may not be as good as others and that's where the vulnerabilities in the platforms like WordPress, exist.

With Craft, everything is provided almost as part of its core. So it does user management, it does image management, which a lot of the platforms do but there's so many field types, for instance. You've got loads of different field types and it's that that aspect of Craft, where everything's in its core and maintained by a professional team means that it's really compact and robust and has that additional layer of security. So those tools you can play around with on the demo site on Craft.

Charlotte White

That's really interesting.

Simon Leadbetter

And then any web developer developing the platform will provide training, hopefully, as part of their package of creating a website. And we do that as well and we will provide our clients with training and an online resource that we've been building, a knowledge base for our clients. So there's lots of ways to learn Craft, but the best way is just to get access to it and play with it a bit.

Charlotte White

Yeah, with the demos.

Simon Leadbetter

Yeah, exactly.

Charlotte White

Yeah. Is there any other resources that they provide aside from the demo sites on the website?

Simon Leadbetter

Well, obviously, there's kind of a mixture, because you've got two types of users on a platform Craft CMS, you've got the developers, and there's loads of technical resources available. The documentation is phenomenal, which is really, actually at the core of many pieces of software, and they do a brilliant job doing that. But if you're a content user, I don't know how many resources are out there to provide content users with an open platform to go and learn. So that's quite an interesting question, and maybe a gap that needs filling.

Charlotte White

Well maybe the listeners can just go and see for themselves as they go visit the Craft website.

Simon Leadbetter

Yes, Craft's website, and I'm sure on YouTube, which is a very good resource for anything where you need to learn stuff. There'll be plenty of people there doing tutorials.

Charlotte White

Yeah, if not Craft themselves, I suppose. Yeah, that's true. Okay, I had one more question for you. I'm curious about how you can scale business using Craft.

Simon Leadbetter

Yeah, really well, and that's another reason we love it. Many other systems rely on theme and templates so that you can just plug in like WordPress and then you've already set up a theme and template system. But that does mean that a lot of the time, every website looks very similar. Whereas Craft is completely agnostic. It doesn't care about what type of site you're creating, or what content you're going to do. It provides you the tools to create any website of any size. So it's really great that way.

From a developer's point of view, pretty much most things are possible in Craft, right? Because so you can build it very small and then gradually build those sections and those resources up. And the fact that it is maintained means it's often the case that as new features get released, they're automatically applied, and then you're growing with the platform as long as you have a proper maintenance plan in place with your developer, so they can upgrade the software. I really like the fact that you could create a single page app site, or you can do a really large scale website that's running ecommerce as well. So you can create all types of sites.

The great thing is, is it's down to the developer and the designer or the agency to create that site for you. So that's the benefit. As your business grows, you might find that you need a new section to the site. And within Craft, you could just go in and create new section, and a new resource a new feature set, which is something that we do quite often with our clients.

Charlotte White

Sounds like it gives designers and developers like more autonomy.

It's exactly that.

They can choose what they think is best and have the capabilities to do that.

Simon Leadbetter

Exactly and obviously, we're big fanboys and fangirls here of Craft because that's what we develop in.

Charlotte White

On the developers side at least! Not so much on the social haha.

Simon Leadbetter

Yes, you guys do the content. So yeah, but we're big fans of it. And, so, yeah. It's the right tool for the job 99.9% of the time and that's what we love about it, we can create anything with that platform. I find that, there's a thing I coined, I don't know if I coined the phrase, but website atrophy. So when you see websites deteriorate over a number of years, the longer a website exists, it begins to lose value. Often you go to a company's website and the last news article was 10 years ago, or five years ago and that's because websites get more and more difficult to use over time.

What I really like about Craft is, if you are handing over the reins to somebody else, because you're leaving your job, it's really quick and easy for that new person to learn how to maintain and update the website. So I think that's another kind of crucial area to look at when you're building websites. How easy is the platform to use? How intuitive is it? We certainly believe, especially from the evidence with all our clients that have been using it for years, that aspect of that platform is really important.

Charlotte White

Yeah, it's setting them up for the long term, I guess as well.

Simon Leadbetter

Yeah.

Charlotte White

And like you say, if it's easy to use, then maybe people like me, would be able to learn

Simon Leadbetter

You know you could use it!

Charlotte White

Haha. I do have one more question actually, since you were answering my last question there I did come up with one. Do you have any favourite projects from Scaramanga that you've done using Craft?

Simon Leadbetter

Oh, my God, we've done so many. What a trick question.

Charlotte White

You can pick a few if you like, you don't just have to just stick to one!

Simon Leadbetter

It's so difficult because they all vary. We've built festival websites and museum websites and venue websites and business websites, there is not one site that I could say that really stands out. Hopefully, with every job that we're doing, we're applying the same care and attention to every project.

Charlotte White

I'm sure you are.

Simon Leadbetter

Yes I'm sure we are! Yeah, so there isn't actually one project that stands out. But the ones that are great is when we recently talked about the the extensibility of the platform. And there's lots of times where we're creating integrations with third party systems. So that's the other thing with Craft, is how extensible it is. So if you need to do something more clever, you can then integrate with third party services. So like CRMs, for instance, we use one, but it's where you keep all your business data, contact data and stuff like that.

So for instance, a website might have a contact form. That data goes directly into the CRM and those kinds of integrations. So that's where it gets interesting because you can create your own private modules and plugins for the platform and extend it and that makes it really quite powerful. Or equally, you can expose the data in Craft because it has its own... now I'm going to use a phrases, which you're going to say "what's that?", but API. What that allows is that you can expose the data that can be consumed by another third party service. So we have done that for a number of clients who wants the data and the content they're reading to Craft to appear on another website.

Charlotte White

Okay.

Simon Leadbetter

So you can open up the Craft CMS platform and allow that content to be called upon and then published on another website. It's a really good system, it does it all.

Charlotte White

That sounds good if I ever become a web developer...

Simon Leadbetter

Haha, and you have no plans to do that?

Charlotte White

I don't have plans to do that! But you've made a good case for craft so it'll definitely stay in my mind. Thank you for coming on the podcast.

Simon Leadbetter

You're welcome.

Charlotte White

Maybe we'll see you again. Who knows.

Simon Leadbetter

Yes. I'm sure I can talk about another subject.

Charlotte White

Another web development subject. Tune in in the following months. We'll no doubt have some special guests coming in, as well as podcasts with some of our staff. But yes, thank you, Simon, and we'll see you soon for the next episode.

Simon Leadbetter

Thank you.