With the Announcement of the End of Life for Business Catalyst by Adobe we have been busy researching and analyzing the state of web design and technology in our market. Business Catalyst was a gem for us, but for some reason or another Adobe decided to abandon their 10-year old service and along with over 770,000 websites that have been built on that platform. 

With the closing of Business Catalyst, many competing CMS Platform services are scrambling to receive their departing clients.

Already experienced with the WordPress, SquareSpace, Wix, and Shopify platforms and services, we have reviewing a number of other and newer CMS Platform candidates that could potentially receive our clients' sites in the future.  They include WebFlow, Weebly, Platform OS (NearMe), SiteGlide and Duda.

Starting off with our smaller sites, we found the Duda CMS Platform to be the easiest to learn and master. Just 3-months into working with them, we have already launched 9 small sites; one for a lawyer, a psychologist, a film production company, an industrial warehousing company, an artist rep, and four fine artists.

Even though Duda has a Business Catalyst Site Migration tool, we are deciding against utilizing it to transfer our sites "as is." We feel we should take this opportunity and learn all about the platform and its services and become the experts that we need to be.

Always cautious with new services, we observed every step in the process of designing, developing and maintaining a site, ensuring that we  may sell the platform to our customers with absolute confidence.  

Our first Duda site was designed for Margy Sperry, a Psychotherapist and Psychoanalyst. It was designed, developed and launched within 10 days, 20-days ahead of the another site that we were developing in WordPress. Both sites had the same amount of content, number of pages, and design challenges, yet completing a site on Duda took us a third of the effort than it did in WordPress.

Next we needed to test the platform's ability to maintain the client's content and all them the ease of making updates. We selected to migrate the site for our client Film Bridge International, a Santa Monica film production company. They had a need to update their site often, and with great joy, they reported back to us on how easy the platform, its tools, and interface were to work with. After 20-years of having a maintenance service agreement with us, they have cut the virtual umbilical cord, starting making weekly updates on their own, and reduced their site maintenance budget by 90%.

Finally, one of our biggest concerns is with SEO and the ability of a Duda site to rank at Google an other major search engines. With the site we developed for PC Cargo (formerly PC Chem) along with their need to get the word our quickly about their new warehousing services, we were able to closely monitor how Duda fares at Google specifically. 

Duda has really focus on this aspect of website marketing in particular. They have architected their platform to adhere closely to Google's best practices, as recommended by Googles PageSpeed test.  Duda sites now regularly score well into their 90s in Google tests. 

Only after a few months of existence, PC Cargo's site has been doubling its traffic weekly.

With design, development, maintenance, and marketing factors all evaluated, we have discovered that Duda is an excellent choice for clients with smaller websites.

Currently we are reviewing the services of SiteGlide, who runs off the Platform OS system, for our larger, scaleable sites, that require all the goodies that Business Catalyst had to offer and more. So stay tuned for an update!

Not happy with the platform your brochure or small business website is on or need one for yourself or your new enterprise? Call or email us today.