“Buying WordPress now is the equivalent of buying IBM back in the day. Nobody got fired for buying IBM, but it didn’t exactly retain its value.”

Which CMS does your agency swear by?

WordPress has dominated the CMS scene for over two decades. But although it’s now often tasked with managing complex websites, It was originally designed for blogging – which makes it harder to adapt for extremely complex websites.

But agencies can’t abandon it completely because it’s familiar and fairly easy to use. And clients won’t buy something that they don’t believe will work. Plus, there’s a whole generation of marketing folks out there who, in the majority, have only known WordPress.

“At some point, somebody has got to manage that website. So if you build a website with something that nobody’s ever heard of, then that person leaves and somebody else comes in that doesn’t know how to manage it, your client is scuppered,” says David Gilroy, MD at Conscious.

To get around this, many agencies opt for creating their own bespoke CMS, which are more customisable and can help differentiate you in the market. But even that doesn’t come without issues.

“Clients want agency neutrality as well – it’s very important. The bigger the business, the more they want that. So they need a platform that, if your agency fails, or the clients falls out with you, they can pick up the website and move it.”

The complications don’t stop there. Other simple-to-use content management systems have arrived on the scene since WordPress’ debut, such as Wix (2006), Webflow (2012), and Ghost (2013), which has left some techies wondering what the future holds. 

“I’m sitting here as somebody who won’t be in the business in 10 years time. What are people going to be building websites with then?”

In this session, we’ll be having an in-depth discussion about the current agency CMS landscape, as well as how it might look in the future. David will be joined by Andy Osborne, technical director at Conscious Solutions, who is responsible for creating the Conscious Platform CMS – which is currently powering hundreds of law firm websites.

We’ll be asking:

• Which CMS does your agency use today? 
• How has it changed in the last decade?
• Do you think you’ll be using it in 10 years?
• Could you be using something better?

Come along to this technical creative mastermind session to hear where others in your role sit in this conundrum and suss out whether your current CMS is the right one for your business.