Why Kontrolit?
With the hundreds of OpenSource products on the market which are “free” to download and use, initially it might make commercial sense for you to use one of these to produce sites for your customers. You can’t go wrong can you? It’s free. That means more money for you doesn’t it? It does everything you and your customers want doesn’t it? It’s perfect isn’t it?
Bespoke or Custom Coding
So your customer has asked you for something on their site that is not in the base package. First off you could persuade them that it is not needed! OK so let’s presume that like most companies you want a happy customer and the opportunity of earning yourself some extra revenue. So what’s next? Well most of the OpenSource packages adopt some form of plugin system. So a quick trawl through those and you may find something that works and it’s problem solved (although you might have issues with patching later on). What if you can’t find a plugin or ready made module?
Well you may need to do some bespoke coding for your customer. Is this something you are comfortable with? Is the time you spend coding, because you don’t do it that often really profitable? Wouldn’t your time be better doing other new work and growing your business?
With Kontrolit bespoke or custom coding can be handled with ease. We are confident that between Kontrolit’s 18 different modules and general flexibility of our administration panel that 95% of what you might need can be easily achieved out the box. If it can’t be then we can quote for any additional work and the people writing the bespoke coding are the same people that wrote the base system. So there isn’t anything that we couldn’t do.
Are you creating successful sites?
How much involvement do you have with the success of your customer sites? It is a case of you build a site, set it up, give your customer a to do list and then you’re on to the next one? Or do have some kind of on going program to bring success?
Most sites and if you have a done a few of them you’ll probably agree have success directly proportional to the amount of effort that goes into them over time. Creating a site and employing a “set it and forget it” is unlikely to equal success.
The SEO tools module and Kontrolit’s focus on Search Engines allows you and your clients to manage on going programs more easily.
If you are not creating successful sites, those that are making a real difference to your customers business perhaps it’s time to consider how the sites are being created?S
Staying Secure
At a basic level staying secure in the Open Source world is a lot harder than staying secure with commercial software. If someone wanted to hack an Open Source site they could download the latest source code, look through the code for any vulnerability and then use it.
With commercial software or Kontrolit the source code is not publically available. So any would be hacker would need to guess on how they can hack a site. So the chances of successful hacks are greatly diminished.
So with Open Source software it is generally a good idea to stay up to date and take preventive steps to keep your sites secure rather than be faced with an emergency situation.
So how much time will it take to patch say 100 WordPress sites? How many times a year would you have to do it? Between June 2010 and July 2011 there were 11 updates to WordPress so roughly every month you would need to patch 100 sites, take care of any plugins that also need updating and reapply/test bespoke code if required. So who pays for this? What does it really cost you?
If there was ever a problem with a Kontrolit site it’s not your problem. It’s ours. We fix it that day. It doesn’t cost you anything it shouldn’t use any of your time.
A Growing Site
Hand on heart; can the site you deliver today grow with your client’s business? Will they come back to you after a year and expect more from their site. Maybe they started with a simple site with a news module and now they want an online shop. Let’s say the site you deliver today is a WordPress site, will an online shop plugin really work for them? Perhaps you suggest that they ditch the WordPress site and move to something like Magneto? So your customer will need to learn a new administration panel , maybe you haven’t done a magneto site for a while and its going to take a while to remember everything? Its certainly going to take some time for you to move them over to the new platform.
Kontrolit allows a site to grow. You may have started your customer off today with a Kontrolite site. Then in a years time they want an online shop. You might opt for the Kontrolite shop module for your customer to test the water or they might go straight for the full version of Kontrolit with the shop module. The upgrade path is simple and takes a few minutes to complete. Your customer has the same administration panel to use and you’ve saved time as the process was so simple.I
Is support free?
There might be thousands of people across the world that make up a free support network for your chosen platform. But what happens if you need support now or you need support for an urgent issue. Do you post on a forum and wait for a helpful response? What if you don’t get one or you do but its several days later? When can you stamp your feet to demand better service for “free” software? Perhaps you take the final step to buy commercial support.
With Kontrolit you get free support from us. If you have an urgent case you call us and we help you. It’s that simple.
Making better sites
How many sites have you recently built where you “wished” it could do this or “wanted” it to do that. Perhaps you’re comfortable with code and you have a little recipe you can use on any new site to get it to work the way you want it to? Maybe you post helpful suggestions on the forums to be voted on for future releases? This might pay off it might not.
Kontrolit has been designed with partners in mind. If you have a good idea on a new feature or on how we can modify it to make you or your customers life easier then it is likely to find its way into the next version.