We just recently listed the three CMS’s we will be using this year in a blog post. One of those CMS’s is not one every web designer/developer would know about, but one we feel is worthy of being used. So we took the initiative to review the CMS in hopes people will give Preation’s Eden Platform a try for themselves.
Strengths
Inline editor
Personally I like to be able to have a WYSWYG and an HTML option much like WordPress offers but I can understand why the Eden Platform uses inline. Our clients are more visual so this helps them edit the site and see exactly how it will look. So we feel the inline editor, while not made for the advanced user, is a great strength to the Eden platform.
SEO Features
Business owners are always looking for easy ways to SEO their sites they want to rank higher and achieve more page views. While this feature is basic knowledge and a reminder at best for the experienced web design/developer it is a must have for the clientele Preation is trying to reach with the Eden Platform, small business owners. So for the Search Engine Optimization feature Preation get an A+.
Drag & Drop interface
Raise your hand if you like drag & drop! If you don’t have your hand up you’re not being truthful. Well Preation gets another A+ for their drag & drop interfaces. You can not only drag and drop the navagation and layout of your site but the actual layout of the page as well!
Pricing
Pricing is great and affordable for any business large or small. Not much more to say here!
Training
Personalized training is included with every Eden Platform account which is a must for a small business owner looking to dive right into building and managing their web site.
Weaknesses
While we have highlighted many strengths we have to be fair and note a few things that we see as weaknesses.
Hosted
Eden platform is a hosted solution built on the SaaS model, this can be viewed two ways. Some people see this as an advantage because they don’t have to manage hosting and they never have to upgrade software manually. As a web design/development company not being able to touch and update our software and code is something that can make us cringe. So depending on where you stand you can see this as a strength or weakness but as a web design/development company we view this as a weakness.
URL Structure/Control
The URL’s Eden spits out are rather funky. As you can see below eden uses a plus(+) versus the popular dash(-). Also a content folder is added to the URL, along with a lot of unneeded numbers. Anyone who has spent more then 15 minutes studying Search Optimization will know that the more relevant your URL’s are to your content the better your chances are to rank well in search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo! and more. Preation does let you create custom URL’s similar to Facebook’s vanity URL’s but it will still redirect to an address like the one below.
About the author
Michael is the president and founder of Red Metal Box and has been the lead developer since he founded the company in 2006. Michael has been designing web sites since 2003.