This article is part of an ongoing series about what makes Gutensite special.
Gutensite is unapologetically a Content Management System. We are not a "visual website builder" like Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, etc. Those platforms are great for what they do. Their visual interface is appealing to first time users that want to express their creativity. However, the creative options can be overwhelming and for non-designers they have a huge potential to be destructive to the website. They can be frustrating for publishers that need to organize a lot of content, extremely limited for websites that need advanced functionality, and they are not appropriate for businesses that want to delegate updating roles to members of their organization who are not qualified to be messing with design.
Content Management Systems on the other hand are optimized to allow anyone to edit content within a powerful website without messing anything up. CMSs may not be as sexy for the administrator, but they keep the website looking it's best for visitors. CMSs should have tools that make managing the content easy and dare we say "fun", and they should empower the administrator to publish content without worrying about critical design decisions.
Gutensite is developing the next version of its platform that will make it much more visual to do in-context editing and allow you to drag content around to combine in protected ways. But our philosophy has always been to build beautiful and powerful websites that clients can manage easily—to separate design from content management. This is what Gutensite is, and what it's good at. And despite all the competition in the visual builder market, professional organizations actually need "old fashioned" content management systems like Gutensite, Drupal, etc.
This article is part of an ongoing series about what makes Gutensite special. See the next article in the series "Flexibility to Grow".
—David Ridenhour
Director of Music and Worship, Lake Oconee Presbyterian Church