New SEO-friendly Content Management System: Pixelsilk

Most readers know that I totally <3 Wordpress.  So when Mark Knowles and the rest of the Smart Solutions team introduced me to Pixelsilk at SMX West, first by sponsoring the meet-n-greet on the initial night, then following Matt McGee, Adam Audette, Will Scott, Todd Mintz and I to dinner, then walking me through a demo on the showroom floor, then stalking me back to my hotel room (OK, OK, that didn’t happen), the deck was stacked against them.

Despite my overwhelming attraction to Wordpress as a CMS, I have to admit, I was pretty darn impressed with Pixelsilk.

The Pixelsilk team went about the idea of a CMS with great consideration for every type of person who touches a website: from the designer, to the developer, to the marketing VP, to the copywriter, to the IT guy, etc., etc.  The SEO (including an agency SEO–doesn’t have to be someone in-house) can make recommendations for each page’s content, or title tags, or anything else on the back end–basically by leaving notes in just the right places–and a marketing or product manager can come along and actually implement the changes.  It’s SUPER-easy for the layperson to understand how stuff fits together (if you can figure out Microsoft Word, you can figure out Pixelsilk) but still allows for an awesome amount of easy customization by designers and developers.  

Pros:

• Back-end interface easy for non-techies to understand.
• Super SEO-friendly (full customization of Title tags, descriptions, H1’s, etc.)
• Easy to set user levels with different administrative access.
• Easy to change individual page skins with one click.
• Like Wordpress, Pixelsilk uses Template tags (or something akin to them), but unlike Wordpress–and here’s the really cool part–you can create your OWN Template tags on the fly.  This would come in super-handy if I wanted to template a particular set of pages as a dropdown menu, or a particular image gallery, etc., etc.

Cons:

• No built-in e-Commerce system. This would have been HUGE for me personally, since there isn’t really a good e-Commerce package for Wordpress.
• Not really affordable for small businesses, since it’s a couple hundred dollars a month & that would eat through most of their design and development budget.  But if you’re a big site and your hosting costs are already a couple hundred dollars a month, this wouldn’t be an issue at all.
• ???  Maybe there are some enterprise-level issues that I don’t understand, so I couldn’t ask any questions about them.

I don’t know that I’ll use PixelSilk for too many of my own clients, just because their budgets aren’t big enough and they typically don’t require the level of customization that Pixelsilk allows (the fishing with dynamite analogy comes to mind).  And I readily admit that I have no experience working inside a large company in terms of understanding the actual flow of getting changes implemented.  But when guys like Adam Audette and Bruce Clay, who have experience on some of the largest sites in the world, are recommending Pixelsilk, I’m pretty confident in doing so as well.

So if you work for a big company, or an agency that designs, develops, or consults for big companies, you might at least head over to Pixelsilk.com and ask for a demo.  And stop by their booth at Searchfest next week to ask all the questions you want!