Choosing the ideal platform for your next website
We’ve built a lot of websites over the years, and while every website looks and feels different, in our experience they fall into 3 buckets:
Relational: Relational websites offer information, but without an immediate ask for a purchase of transaction. These sites try to pursuade you to enter into some type of relationship with in hopes of a transaction in the future, but not now. This can come in the form of signing up for a newsletter, booking an appointment to visit, or simply reaching out to begin a chat or email conversation.
Transactional: Transactional websites are designed to hook you into buying something, right here and now. It can be a product or a service, but the main differentiator between a transactional and relational website is that an exchange of money is made immediately for a good or service through a webpage.
Functional: Functional websites are highly specialized and purpose built to meet a specific need. For example, Gmail and Office 365 are functional websites and apps, as it performs email and productivity functions. Search engines like Google and Bing (the search engines) are further examples of functional sites, as it performs searches and nothing else.
Can one tool do it all?
There are tools on the market that claim to do it all, or you can install enough plugins to jerryrig a website to work the way you want it to. The problem with generalist tools is they do everything okay, but many business owners end up in one of the following scenarios:
The scale problem: A generalist tool may be a quick way to get started, but once you hit a certain level of scale or sales, the tool starts buckling under the weight of manual processes and exceptions because it was never built to scale and grow
The house of cards: You end up having to jerryrig a platform to do things that it was never to do, and you end up losing track of all the different pieces of the platform that you’ve tacked on to make things work, and often when things break you have no idea where to start debugging
The cost problem: A general tool seems inexpensive to implement, but the more you scale or do more, you have to keep paying developers to expand and maintain your asset
The fragility problem: Over time, the platform starts eating up more and more resources for some reason, and any type of modification or load brings the website to a crashing halt
The right tool for the right job
The growth of Software-as-a-Service space in the last decade has spawned a number of specialist tools that target each of these segments without compromise, addressing the common pain points of growth and scale. Best of all, the best SaaS platforms adhere to the KISS principle: Keeping it really simple and empowering users to do what they need to do without having to constantly rely on others.
Squarespace is an excellent SaaS platform to build relational websites for small and medium-sized businesses, looking for uncomplicated ways to tell compelling stories. The web-based editors are simple to use, and everything is fully hosted so there are no headaches of server and OS maintenance that comes with conventional websites
Shopify is a the ideal choice for buildling any Transactional website. The features of product and category management baked in, and the bevy of free and paid storefront theme options allow you to customize your look and feel without compromising the simple customer transaction flow from selecting products to checking out with a credit card.
Why it is the right time for SaaS
Both of the above options have common benefits that we love in SaaS platforms:
No hardware or software maintenance, so your IT teams can focus on what's important
No security patches to maintain, so no constant wories about breaches of customer data
No assets to purchase, and free trials are a no-brainer incentive to try them out
There are so many platforms out there, and these are two that we trust the most for our clients. Confused and ready to have a chat about your website, or are you in the third category where you need a functional application scoped and developed for your needs? Contact us today and let's chat.
Author
Ray Lai is a managing partner of Promentum Technologies, and has been storytelling with websites for two decades. He’s an AWS certified solutions architect, and a Shopify certified solutions partner.