I saw this post recently over on the SEO blog at Seer Interactive.  I had the good fortune of meeting Wil Reynolds at a recent industry event and continue to check out the tips and info that he posts on his blog and elsewhere.  Wil makes a couple of really good points in this post where he says:

Why do companies continue to not use off the shelf tools, to build their own CMS / Blog / Forum, I don’t know.

By using a highly popular platform for your content delivery, you’ll likely:
1 - Cut costs & open yourself up to a larger developer pool in the case you need development help
2 - Make it easier for Google to parse your data

He continues on to cover more about #2 in the rest of the post.

That being the case, I'd like to address #1.  In fact, this has become a bit of a pet peeve of mine lately.

A friend of mine recently won a bid for redesigning a local Chamber of Commerce website.  I wish I had been more involved in this process.  The initial plan was to use something like Joomla as the core software to run the site.  Great option, runs a gazillion websites online, strong user base, lots of addons.  This seemed like a solid plan.  However, the client wanted a few features not readily available in Joomla.  At that point, it would have probably been a better idea to either:

1. Outsource the development of the necessary add-ons and bill the client accordingly or
2. Let the client know about the limitations and see if they'd agree to adjust the scope of work and deliverables

Neither of those things happened.  Instead, the web developer created a custom CMS and the database guy (a different person than the web developer) created the database functionality.  Here are just a few of the problems with this setup (there are a bunch and I'll probably miss some):

• The CMS now needs to be tested for just the basic functionality (like making sure all the links work, etc), changing the project from a web design task to a full-on software development/software testing task (a much different level of effort).
• Documentation has to be created for the custom CMS from scratch, proofread, etc.
• The client will have to go back to THIS SPECIFIC developer if new functionality needs to be added to the site, unless they can find someone that's proficient with PHP and the code is well-documented.
• The database was done in Java (I think) and requires a server setup that is making it difficult to even find a decent web host.  Why not MySQL or something else that's already found on the umpteen million web hosts available online?  I dunno'.
• The database and CMS aren't playing nice with each other.  As you navigate through the site, the results you get vary based on the sequence of pages you click on as you move through the site, sometimes resulting in blank pages because of poor database interaction.  It seems like this could be an infinite loop as far as testing goes, or at least an exponentially huge number of possible test cases for each and every way someone could click through to find a specific page.  Ouch!
• And no mention yet of how secure the website will be or any security testing being done (and no user based of webmasters to help identify possible security issues either).

The list goes on and on.

Needless to say, I agree with Wil and it's insane to think that you need to develop some sort of custom script to run your website.  Not only could you possibly miss out on some of the potential SEO benefits Wil mentions in his article, but what business wants to go through the headache of software development if they don't have to?

I doubt there are many businesses out there that have a website idea so novel that some smart web geek somewhere hasn't already figured out how to do that.  After all, you can even buy scripts that allow you to create your own YouTube, probably one of the most technically complex sites out there.  So why re-invent the wheel?  I saw a recent blog post titled "Complicated Businesses Suck".  The same holds true for websites, unless you want your project delivered late and wrong.

Just as an aside, the same can be said for basic web design too.  One of my favorite articles on this is from Seth Godin discussing "How to Create a Good Enough Website".  Here's a quick excerpt of what Seth says in that article:

I'm going to go out on a limb and beg you not to create an original design. There are more than a billion pages on the web. Surely there's one that you can start with? If your organization can't find a website that you all agree can serve as a model, you need to stop right now and find a new job.

Not a site to rip-off, but an inspiration. Fonts and colors and layout. The line spacing. The interactions. Why not? Your car isn't unique, and your house might not be either."

Bottom Line:

If you're a business owner looking at having some sort of web development project done, don't be lured into thinking that because someone is doing something "from scratch" or "by hand", that it's necessarily better.  This is not baking a cake.  And very rarely will you be paid more for doing things the longer or harder way.