Somebody asked me last week if we could combine WordPress with Business Catalyst – integrate a WordPress blog into the Business Catalyst interface.  Nice Idea, but not possible without a large development team and a couple years up your sleeve.

But what if somebody was doing that? Making a flexible system that was focused on Internet Marketing and SEO, which had a CRM and store etc. tightly integrated. Now that would be a Kick-ass system. Certainly both WordPress and Business Catalyst have their limitations and for a number of reasons, the BC model is proving to be troublesome. Particularly:

1. Having all sites on a central system means updates are applied across the whole system without exception. It’s generally great to have updates, but what if you had used a whole lot of custom code? What if upgrades conflicted with your code and as a result your site came down or didn’t function properly.
2. BC has no staging area, so when sites are effected by updates, you have to try and fix them on a live site. This is particularly stressful when your client is testing it before your QA team can look at it and often one change affects something elsewhere on the site.

There is also the limitation of having a software company develop, vs having an online community develop. The Internet is changing rapidly and what yesterday was considered “out there” is today considered a standard feature – and the pace is rapidly accelerating.

Will the Adobe software  development style of working be quick enough to keep up with change?

Here’s something else to consider when you are wondering what system is best to use:  Security.

With WordPress, there are some serious security holes and particularly if a developer is not aware of them, your site can be quickly hacked or compromised. For instance, the dafault setting on many wordpress files allows Global read/write access, meaning that anybody who knows how to access those files can change them and gain access to your server, passwords etc.

This problem does not relate only to wordpress, it is probably any free CMS software that you host yourself. If you are not aware of security issues and correct settings on this software, you are potentially open to hackers. There are of course also security issues with shared hosting environments depending on how vigilant the hosting provider is in checking for and controlling security breaches.

Business Catalyst on the other hand is a hosted solution, where there is tight control over those settings and breaches are not as likely to occur and if they do, it is Adobe Business Catalyst’s problem, not yours. This is one advantage a hosted solution has over a free, host-it-yourself solution.

If you are considering using Business Catalyst as a development platform, here is a group of good Business Catalyst Designers you may want to contact.

This is something we get a lot of inquiry on, so I’d just like to explore the strengths and weaknesses of both systems.

A word of warning, this is not really a good comparison as they are totally different systems with different focuses – it’s like comparing a thoroughbred horse with a Clydesdale.  But here goes.

WordPress is an extremely efficient blogging engine, that’s what it was designed for. It is very good for search engine ranking, is light and can be modified to make a standard website with a custom theme. An example of this is the office space Cebu website. However, that is about the limit of wordpress’s ability. Attempts at making a shopping cart or a catalog, look like the Hero’s Pizza website in Perth, pretty limited.

Business Catalyst is a fully integrated system that makes a great small business website or store. It has a blog, but that is not even in the same world as WordPress.  You can make a powerful shopping cart, or listing website with Business Catalyst. BC has some great Members area features including Web Apps, which allow you to build little pages that people who are members can setup and maintain independently, like real estate listings. BC has some good SEO strengths, but also some weaknesses. It is certainly not as powerful as WordPress in that regard.

You cannot host BC wherever you want, it is a hosted solution – software as a service. You either buy a license up front or  host on one of their partner’s system. On the other hand, you can install WordPress on any Linux server you want, it’s free.

My advice: Use both. Use WordPress for what it is designed for and Business Catalyst for a more comprehensive solution. Don’t try and make a powerful blog in Business Catalyst and don’t try and make a comprehensive website in WordPress.

With Adobe’s launch of CS5 and it’s introduction of Business Catalyst to it’s huge database of web developers, people will begin to ask the question: “Is Adobe Business Catalyst good for SEO?” and the answer is “yes and no” – which is basically the way you would answer a question like “do guns kill people?” Business Catalyst is a tool or a platform and it is what you do with it that makes it good or bad for SEO.

Adobe Business Catalyst is a tightly integrated set of web tools, each of which is reasonable on it’s own – you will find a better CMS, or a better CRM on it’s own, but not integrated in the way they are in Business Catalyst. The CMS has all the SEO features we expect these days from a Content Management System, like the auto generated XML Google sitemap, plain English page names and and it does not fill your page with redundant source code.

But whether your site is good or bad for SEO is entirely up to you. It depends on you writing clean CSS, doing your homework, researching keywords and including those keywords in the right places on your website. It’s not really Adobe Business Catalyst that will be good or otherwise for SEO, it is you.

So what is Adobe going to do now with Business Catalyst?

While BC partners focus on the detail such as “are they going to expand the Triangle plugin?”, there is a bigger issue and that is the platform. Many of us were overjoyed that Adobe bought the system and not Microsoft, who are known for making radical changes and using customers as their QA team, but Microsoft is still involved with this – The system is built on .NET, using SQL Databases.

Why did they choose that platform? Try developing a system in Australia using Php/MySql and finding enough good developers – Those guys are a bit thin on the ground there, and anyway, even to us open source evangelists, .NET has proved to be quite stable.

But if you were a company like Adobe and you were looking at something that could become the world’s biggest hosting platform, would you want to be locked in to paying Microsoft Server and SQL licenses for eternity? I imagine there are some serious price discussions happening behind the scenes between the two companies and I bet there are other options on the table.

Linux and open source programming, certainly. I’d use a new, efficient programming language like Ruby on Rails – MySQL? Maybe not – after all, Sun is now the owner and the licensing of that database could always change. Maybe Adobe will snap up another good open source database like PostgreSQL – a relational database resembling Oracle and a good alternative to both MySQL and MS SQL.

Whatever happens, these are exciting days for BC partners and I think the speed with which the system is released to the Adobe community will be a good indication of the platform they have settled on. It would certainly take time to replicate the system in another technology.

Adobe’s recent acquisition of Business Catalyst has put the spotlight on this growing CMS system and excited many Business Catalyst system owners.

So why would I write about this in a blog about Search Engine Optimization?

Simple – I run a company that specializes in designing and developing websites in this system – one of only two companies outside the developed world who do this.

Of course officially, Adobe and Business Catalyst are giving very little detail about any changes, but for what it’s worth, here’s my take on the whole thing:

1. It’s good news for everyone, Adobe has a history of not messing with programs that are working, they just simply improve them. Look at the Macromedia takeover. Many of us thought for instance that Fireworks would be discarded as Photoshop handles so much of that functionality, but Adobe kept the full product range intact.
2. This deal makes sense – Business Catalyst’s target market is Web developers and they all use Adobe products- and Adobe has their contact details. This is the logical next step in Adobe’s expansion into software as a service (SaaS).  It could also make them a major player in web hosting.
3. It is a stamp of approval on the Business Catalyst platform. So Business Catalyst users can be assured of having a system which is about to become the generic CMS. It will have a long shelf life and will be developed into a more feature-rich system, probably more tightly-integrated with other Adobe products.