Clickability CMS is it for you?
Overall Satisfaction with Clickability
I worked for the only authorized re-seller for Clickability. We did mainly websites for tv and radio stations but there were a mix of other customers in there as well. For many years it was our main cms platform which we managed 100+ different websites on it. I know we were the edge case for this type of usage as other customers 10+ sites was a huge number. Clickability main selling point is you do not have to waste IT resources and time maintaining a CMS platform because Clickability hosts the platform themselves and uses their own CDN and servers. Lets break down the pros and cons of this approach.
- Easy to get going for a business that has tons of content they need to manage.
- Clickability offers development and design services so you don't really even need IT.
- No need to worry about server uptime, storage, bandwidth, etc you have all the reports at your fingers for what you are using.
- Simple template and content design system, easy to expand and add.
- Powerful CMS and settings with a design and programming guide provided.
- AkAMAI and Limelight CDN's can be used for powerful and fast loading in many regions.
- Debugging tools to see how long specific templates and content load is exceptional. One can narrow down that this specific template ran X number of times and took this look and had to be stopped at X number of time due to exceeding set limits.
- Having a built in Dev, Staging, Production environments for testing makes seeing new features and how they will integrate into your site seamless.
- If you are not constantly updating content then maybe this isn't the best CMS for you.
- Turn around time on development can be lackluster and most find it easier to have 1-2 developers on staff for larger projects.
- Over the years outages have happened but slowness is more common to due the shared platform and logic programming errors. This has improved greatly but still can happen.
- The programming language behind clickability that is exposed is Apache Velocity. https://velocity.apache.org/engine/releases/velocity-1.5/user-guide.html While basic it is not as powerful as other web developers are used to.
- The guide can be simplistic and more examples could be useful. Also cryptic special case features that are not widely can be troublesome.
- Costs for storage, transfer and bandwidth can be costly because of limited options for where to store such content.
- Development and Staging does not load on the normal servers so performance testing can be difficult to compare to production before launching a new template or code.
- Extensive performance tools are in place because it is extremely easy to have non scaling, badly performing code as sites get bigger.
- Most of the support team is based in CA, so support hours are geared towards US which could be a deterrent for European customers.
- Faster turn around time for adding new features.
- Cost savings on IT personal.
- Ability to work from anywhere built in is a huge plus.
Worldnow and IBSYS were the two biggest competitors for the markets we were in. Cost was a huge factor because Clickability is by far cheaper then the other two in most use cases. Each varies depending on the contract you can negotiate. Really it just comes down to what are you doing with the platform. Ad's and revenue can be a huge factor and Worldnow and IBSYS provide extensive support in those areas Clickability does not; however clickability is so flexable that you can use Google or other plug and play ad networks with ease. If you already have ad software you are used to you may not be allowed to use it with Worldnow and IBSYS and before forced to use their systems.
Using Clickability
40 - When we were using Clickability everyone from Ad Revenue team, content publishers, to developers used Clickability to build and support our customers.
10 - We had a range of people, at the height we had a full support team and full development team which consisted of 10 people.
- Rapid website development.
- Content management for us and our customers.
- Metrics and traffic information.
- We pioneered using templates to help rapidly develop and customize websites for our customers.
- Use Clickability metrics along with Google Analytics along with other tracking tools to provide a in depth perspective of what content was generating traffic.
- Provide ways to share our content with other sites, via feeds or api. Getting the content out there makes it more valuable.
Clickability Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Change management was a minor issue with the implementation
- Content Migration takes an extensive amount of time because you don't have access to those tools to migrate content.
- Performance issues with written code not working as expected.
Clickability Support
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Good followup Knowledgeable team Kept well informed Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | Slow Resolution Escalation required |
Yes - If you want the best 24/7 support you need to pay for it.
Yes - Code bugs can take 3-6 months to get into production unless it is critical. Depending on if it only affects you or all customers it could be week to months.
It is hard to identify exceptional, I guess the best have been when there was an outage. Those type of issues get addressed extremely quickly.
Using Clickability
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Like to use Easy to use Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- Publishing Content, you create it and select where you want to be published. Depending on your workflow or permissions you might need to wait for it to be reviewed before it goes live.
- Setting up permission roles for first time users, this can be cumbersome and time consuming. Also when you make new areas of content depending on how you have your permissions setup you will have to add or redo some of them.
- Building sections have to be done a section at a time, fortunately templates make this go faster but depending on how complicated your sections are it can be time consuming.
- Exporting content, there is no customer facing way to do this in an efficient manner due to code and content limits.
Yes, but I don't use it