Are you in the market for a new website? Narrowed it down to WordPress and Business Catalyst but can’t decide which way to go? Then this blog post is for you!

We have worked with Business Catalyst since 2009. … You can check out our Business Catalyst portfolio below.
In fact I even had a coffee with Bardia Housmann, the Aussie founder of Business Catalyst while I was in San Francisco last year. After years of hard work and persistence, he sold the company in 2011 for $110m to Adobe!

Bardia leaned over to me at the coffee shop and asked me what I thought of Business Catalyst since Adobe had taken over. I was honest in my approach. I said ‘it just hasn’t innovated enough. When Adobe came along we all expected a lot of stuff to be updated, but it just hasn’t happened. We’re now working with WordPress much more than we are Business Catalyst’.

That was in 2013, and I must say, even though we had all but departed the Business Catalyst camp, churning out 6-8 websites a month on WordPress (and able to offer a cheaper build and hosting solution much to the delight of our clients), in more recent times… Adobe have actually picked up their game and rolled out some new features, resolved some of the things the developer community were frustrated with, and have even rolled out some good mobile responsive templates.

Having seen a number of scenarios play out in web projects in recent years, we are really clear on for which types of websites Business Catalyst is best, and when WordPress may be a better choice.

There are a number of questions I’d ideally get the opportunity to ask you to help you with your decision (or trusting clients generally let us make that decision for them) but one of the big ones is how large the site will be and whether it will be a large ecommerce or catalogue site. If it is,… I’d suggest Business Catalyst is a better option.… If the site is small (say 10 pages) and pretty straight forward, you’d be best to stick with WordPress).

If you want a really high level of customised design, Muse is also good to use with Business Catalyst.

We are currently working on a major website overhaul for our website – www.thecreativecollective.com.au – (its a bit like a plumber with leaky taps – we never get around to working on our own site!) and due to the size of the site (we have over 800 pages) we are sticking with Business Catalyst, using a theme and then customising it to suit ourselves.

Even though both myself and my business partner have design skills and some coding skills, we would always still get one of our developers to do the integration.

It’s time consuming and you’re best to leave it to the professionals when it comes to this stuff. There is enough work in handling the content and being clear about putting together a brief on what you want without getting your hands dirty with code.

I hope that helps you with your dilemma of deciding which way to go when it comes to Business Catalyst versus WordPress. If you’d like to discuss your own situation in more detail, please contact us.… 

If we can provide you with an end to end solution for your web development, or only work on the parts you need technical assistance with, just let us know what you need. We look forward to hearing from you.