Beta time, baby!

Do you own, or want to own a Web site? Do you develop Web sites for other people? Do you design Web sites? Do you hate cheesy marketing copy that asks multiple questions in the introduction?

If you're reading this letter then you probably answered 'yes' to one or more of the preceeding questions...hopefully not the last one. You've might also have collaborated with a site owner, designer or developer in the past (at work or for personal reasons). I assume your continued interest in the Web means it was successful—and tolerable. Sure, there were probably fights and misunderstanding about color palettes, site layouts, hosting plans and DNS entries, but I want to assure you of one thing: It's a beautiful relationship.

The Beautiful Relationship

What we have as site owners, designers and developers is a beautiful relationship. We've learned to trust the fact that each of us is better at some things than others (unless of course you're that rare triple-threat), and by collaborating we do better work . Site designers make things beautiful. Site developers make things functional. Site owners produce the Web's content and keeps everyone working.

Back in 2006 our company came to the conclusion that most CMS (or CMS-like) products try to interfere with our beautiful relationship. Too often the products either touted individual independence with technical ignorance, boxed in creative people, or failed to deliver collaboration tools that were useful. In other words, in most cases the products we tested either underserved or at least took one person in the trio for granted:

• Open Source CMS products woo the developer with feature rich applications, but they confuse the site owner with their complex set ups, tricky installations and complex workflows
• Blogging software (which often pretends to be true CMS) will catch the eye of site owners, but leaves the developer wanting more. Web sites need nested navigation, breadcrumb trails and multiple page templates. Most blogging systems leave the developer to rig their own solutions to these needs. Furthermore the designer is almost pushed entirely out of the picture as the blogging tool boasts of it's "design templates".
• Instant Web Site publishing tools want the site owner all by himself, snubbing the developer and designer with drag and drop interfaces that don't ever seem to work quite right and limit the site's creativity. This system neglects the important skills of site designers and developers. And why do the sites always look like blogs anyways?
• Desktop products aren't even worth discussing because they eventually frustrate the site owners, ruin the developer's code, and leave designers thinking building cross browser, cross Mac/PC sites can be done from the 'WYSIWIG' editor.

Our core principles

We founded this company with a simple notion—we can build the first CMS platform that is equally empowering for site owners, designers and developers. We want to build a tool that strengthens the beautiful relationship—not diminishes its importance. We need each other, and JoinSources is designed to help us work faster, collaborate better, and spread the love. We developed a CMS platform that is tied to a simple social ecosystem. You can work alone, or you can work with others to create well-designed, well-built and easily-maintained Web content. To do this, we created three high-level principles that guide our platform:

• Site designers need to be confident that their client's are getting a CMS that provides support and makes it easy for them to edit Web content without assistance.
• Site developers need to be able to develop outside of the CMS (using their native tools) and migrate page templates into the system with little effort. They also shouldn't have to write a single line of server-side code to include typcial Web site features like nested navigation, section navigation and breadcrumbs. In short, developing should be very, very simple.
• Site owners need to feel empowered. They need to feel in control of their Web site and unafraid that they can break it. They also need to feel that they are not a slave to the CMS.

We're trying to join sources of information, talent, code—and yes—revenue for our members into one centralized location. Over the next few months we're going to be rolling out an ever-growing set of services that tie in with our CMS. You'll be able to work on multiple Web sites from one log in screen and also edit blogs, news feeds, event calendars and more. You can then share content and CMS access across multiple Web sites, and invite your friends or colleagues to collaborate and expand our network. All this is done in a secure, stable hosted environment.

Your success is our success

To prove that we aim to develop a CMS platform that can be used to develop the most robust, fully-featured Web site possible, we've developed our own marketing Web site within JoinSources. This means than when JoinSources leaves Beta our ability to market our own products will be tied to the features of the CMS we build for our audience —and that keeps the stakes high.

We'd like to keep you informed of what we're up to, and even roll out beta invitations as we determine we can adequately support new members. If you're interested, please visit our marketing Web site and complete the Contact form. Thanks for reading, and with any luck someday we'll all JoinSources and conquer Web content.

Yours truly,

The JoinSources Team