I also like others don't think that bashing competitors is the way to go for you, whether your product is great or not. The price listed at the end of the page adds to the bad taste for me.
However you may notice that your Demo page has been "hacked", in a truly great way, redirecting everyone to wordpress.org.
<p style="text-align: justify;">This is a little test. <em> <strong>lol</strong></em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p>
<script>// <![CDATA[
window.location = 'http://wordpress.org';
// ]]></script>
</p>
I really value simplicity, security and reliability and therefore use an offline generator for static HTML pages.
I don't really see the use case for something in between a "fire and forget" static HTML site and a well administrated full featured Wordpress (or similar) CMS. As soon as you add PHP or other server side executable you'll need to update constantly and run into update problems.
c'mon, folks - WP runs 40% of the friggin' web, and it's a free OS project. It isn't anyone's "competitor".
WP is what most Mom & Pop shows think of when they want to make a simple website, and alternatives will continue to measure themselves against it & tell you why they fit a different niche. That's just simple marketing.
We use an in-house created 'CMS' for our basic tutorials and documents in the team, and I'm pretty proud to say that it looks and behaves almost exactly like this, right down to the edit screen. Clearly not the only ones with the idea then.
It's not about features, it's about the ease of setup and maintaining the pages.
> If (like us) you just want a few editable pages or elements on a page for clients to edit, then here you go.
Seems fair enough. To me the value is a small site where I can just do some simple stuff.
Granted I have not really used WordPress, but I am just going to assume that there is /something/ to what they say - considering they base their whole product on it.
(And yes I have heard that WordPress is very easy to setup)
Thanks for the feedback everyone.
This really helps a lot.
When you put things out there like this you have no idea if it makes any sense so thanks again.
Wordpress is still a great solution for many projects.
However, there are a lot of web designers who need to allow clients to edit only one or two pages of a site. They don't need to change the design or add new pages or anything else. That would freak them out.
Plus - they work with static HTML templates like Bootstrap themes or other and don't want (can't) convert it to a WP theme.
Lots of solutions for this purpose are around (CushyCMS, SurrealCMS, PageLime etc) - this is another in that vein - but there are differences to all of these.
If the right project or client came up then this would work really well.
I personally wouldn't use Dropkick, simply because you bash your "competitor" (not really since you charge 30 bucks for a simple CMS) in the first headline.
Wow, seriously? A single meal can cost 30 bucks. As a software engineer I'm offended that people don't want to pay the price of a single meal for something that provides a lot more value.
I won't buy it, because I already have a good toolset, but it seems like a good solution.
... and also as someone who makes websites for owners of small business, having something simple is paramount. Joomla is too complicated because it does too much. Wordpress is great as blog software but not created as a cms. They need a page editor, an easy way to add something to a menu and maybe some custom dbfields like imagelists, filelist so you can output these separately in the template.
Definitely thought it was called "Wordpress is overkill" for a good portion of the page. Doesn't help that that's the biggest text on the page when you first load it.
Regarding the dynamic live-updating content, why? What is the use case for that?
lastly, the demo site doesn't seem to even track the edit page at all. When I loaded the admin section, there was a picture, bolded text, and some text that was different from the home page.
Clicking "try the demo" made FF 38.0.5 eat up 2.7Go RAM. Page was never able to load, process froze and I had to kill it. Not really what I call lightweight.
Curious to see if this picks up, seems a bit counter-intuitive to me (if the project is so small, I'd just draft up the pages myself, why bother with a full-fledge CMS?), but there are probably people who'll like that?
Updating is necessary on any dynamic system. Your CMS will be no exception.
With more or different scopes, Plugins are necessary. And yes you can implement all needed Plugins static into a CMS, but then you have to update definitely the CMS with more potential Bugs.
And yes WordPress need better competitor.
And yes, every PHP developer in the last 15 years build his own CMS with staic site generator, without update hassle... because they never update ;-)
I don't think there's anything wrong with ask people to pay upfront if you have good demos, videos and screenshots.
Numbers showing that freemium increase conversion would be interesting, I just do see it being worth the hassle.
Also, it's PHP, how would you avoid people just using your code and not pay? You could do a stripped down version, but that's a lot of addition work for $30... and can you strip out that much functionality from something as small as this?
It's a barrier. From personal experience new technology adoption in a company starts with an internal evangelist. If you work in a company and need to go through a procurement process to buy something before you even get to try it, you are less likely to have a play and get hooked. In a space that is awash with at least free to try alternatives it makes it that bit harder to engage with 'that guy'. The trick is making money once the whole team is using it.
I don't think that companies that have a procurement process is that same company that will buy a $30 CMS.
We routinely pay $20-100 for software we may never end up using. It's a small enough amount that if it pays of the saving on internal development time easily make up of the next ten small investments that didn't work out.
However you may notice that your Demo page has been "hacked", in a truly great way, redirecting everyone to wordpress.org.