People love Perch: Andy Howells

We love to hear how much People love Perch and this interview is with Andy Howells of Unleash It.

Tell us a bit about yourself

I’m Andy (@andyunleash) and I work with Unleash It, a small web dev & design shop in Southampton, and our site is unleash-it.co.uk (which uses Perch!). Our customer projects are mostly for small and medium businesses and we use Perch on about 90% of them. Some recent projects include alexlouise.com for a newly signed musician who is releasing her album soon. We’re working for her label as well on a number of projects so there’ll be more Perch based sites going up through 2013.

Also southernindustrialdoors.co.uk is another Perch project, they provide installations for security doors/windows etc at factories and manufacturing locations.

Why did you choose Perch?

The number one reason is, it doesn’t get in the way. By that, I mean we can craft and code from scratch with no restraints and then when customers have approved the static version of the site, we can simply throw Perch in to make it dynamic and updateable for customers.

We found that customers don’t want “everything and the kitchen sink” and providing something like Wordpress, or other huge backend systems, is like giving them enough rope to hang themselves with. With Perch it’s straightforward and simple and they can’t break things!

Support is great, Drew & Rachel are always pretty hot on queries posted and point you in the right direction. Perch is flexible, but one area we have had trouble is building more in depth apps and tools for customer requirements, [so] sometimes we build it separately and then link to it from Perch admin.

How do you find working with Perch?

Working with Perch is awesome, it’s super fast and easy to install and use, customers pick it up with little to no training and seem to be able to get along great with it. It doesn’t impact our design or front end development which I’m grateful for. I feel other CMSs interfere too much and dictate a required structure or way of developing that may not suit every project.

How do your content creators/site owners find working with Perch?:

Customer feedback has been great, we’ve got it deployed on about 20 sites and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive because it’s simple to approach and easy for them to update images, text & news.