Open Source software is freely available to download, edit and use as you please. Many website companies use popular, cheap open source CMS platforms such as WordPress and Joomla for their clients.
Closed or proprietary software is custom-build to ensure quality, security and ease of upgrades for the future.
Open Source
Great for simple blogs and personal websites, built and maintained by a large community of software enthusiasts.
Pros
free, including free plugins
easy to setup for programmers
many web developers are familiar with the code / programming
Cons
easily hacked into, weekly security upgrades needed (partly due to the number of programmers who know how to use it)
can be overly technical and difficult to use (tries to be everything to everyone)
costly to maintain, upgrades require expert assistance, plugins often do not work with latest security upgrades
For businesses we believe open source software is too insecure, costly to maintain and difficult to keep up with the constant upgrades required. As it is maintained for free, there is little incentive or accountability to fix issues as they arise, especially for the free plugins which are required to customise the website to suit a clients needs.
Proprietary Software
Flexible, customised software which is professionally maintained and held accountable by Evolved Websites.
Pros
flexible, we custom-build each feature required, making it fast & tailed just to your project
stable & easy to use, tried-and-tested over 8 years with real businesses to produce a simple, fool-proof website
secure, only Evolved Websites and our team know the website code used, preventing hacking attempts
support, we have a vested interest in keeping your site up and running, offering exceptional customer support for over 12 years to 100+ clients
Cons
costs more than open source initially, however no maintenance costs as any bugs are fixed free of charge
longer setup as each feature is custom-built for speed and security
Evolved CMS is owned by Evolved Websites, however the entire public website and all design files belong to the client, we also offer a severance clause for peace of mind:
“Severance, in the case of Evolved Websites not being able to provide reasonable support and future upgrades to the website (at market prices), the entire website including design, content, hosting, Evolved CMS Admin and all related materials will be returned to the Client, who may contract another web developer to work on the website.”
By building a closed (not open source) website, Evolved Websites significantly reduces the risk, and success, of our website being hacked into and exploited.
Markup.io is a new online tool that is blowing my mind, I used to have to take a screenshot, draw on it using Preview, save it, attach to email. No longer!
How DO these people keep coming up with these things?
It really shows how everything is going web-based though, so many apps and tool are now available online.
Our most recent (and as yet un-launched) projects asked us to make sure the website would hold up under enormous pressure, up to 1,200 concurrent users filling out a series of survey forms over SSL.
We were delighted to discover our Evolved CMS handled this all very very well, the only changes we made to handle the load (apart from hosting with RackSpace CloudSites) was to compress the CSS and Javascript files in static files.
We used the excellent LoadStorm.com load testing service to run our tests, we can highly recommend them and their personalised support (thanks Scott).
The Evolved CMS is now certified to handle up to 1,200 concurrent users at a time, that’s over 100,000 visitors a day.
We’ve just completed a small update to the Evolved CMS which converted high DPI images to 72dpi, so if you accidentally upload ready-for-print images at 300dpi they will be automatically resized to 72dpi, saving tons of space and making the image much much faster to view for your website visitors.
At the same time we decided to introduce another small, but big, update which converts CMYK (again, print-ready images) to RGB. Some browsers like Safari show CMYK images as very black, dark images, see images below. This fix will show those images how they were intended in full-colour, on the web.
Applies to the Evolved CMS v6.7 and Evolved CMS v8.1, if you are interested in an upgrade please contact us.
We are pleased to introduce a new feature for eNewsletters, Worldview.
Worldview shows each and every subscriber on a world map as they open your eNewsletters, complete with name, email and if they opened, clicked or shared via Facebook or Twitter.
A great quote which very much applies to our business:
“It’s difficult for inexperienced merchants to recognize value.
We’d spend countless hours trying to explain ‘pain’ and our cure but some just didn’t care because they hadn’t felt it yet.”
Its so hard to convince new clients that our Evolved CMS offers good value, all they see is the price tag. But for clients who have already had a CMS that doesn’t work, or it too technical like Joomla, or too easy to mess up like WordPress, they have felt the pain, and can value a stable, easy to use website such as the Evolved CMS.
Selling to people looking for a cure is so much easier than trying to describe the pain, and why they need our cure. A good cure sells itself.
We’ve been trialling some new software which allows us to record and watch customers moving their mouse around the website to see exactly what they are doing wrong, its helped our clients to identify issues on their shopping cart and increase sales.
Examples of improvements we’ve made to clients websites based on these recordings:
we noticed that customers accidentally add the wrong size clothes to their cart, as the sizes keep reverting to ‘XXL’, which frustrates them as they need to go back, add the right size and delete the wrong size from their cart. We now save their chosen size on all similar products.
find customers who have abandoned the cart, those that added items but never checked out, and watch to see why they left (e.g. to find out the freight price was a common reason)
added a ‘continue shopping’ button for customers who added 1 product to cart but acted lost after this. A simple call to action with the ‘continue shopping’ button made the shopping process much smoother.
converted a size chart image to a table that can be clicked to choose your size, after we noticed confusion among shoppers how the size chart worked.
You can see a short video of someone filling out the Evolved Websites contact form, see as they type and also move around with their mouse:
…and another video on Visitor Tracking – Filling out Forms:
