People love Perch: John Robinson

We love to hear how much People love Perch and this interview is with John Robinson, a freelance graphic designer based in Stockport in the UK.

Tell us a bit about yourself:

I’m a freelance graphic designer based in Stockport. I run a tiny design business from my home making carefully crafted websites, logos and brands for small businesses.

What sites have you used Perch for recently?

johnrobinsondesigner.co.uk – I recently moved my website over to Perch. For a while I’d been using Wordpress to power the blog section but I found it slow and I’d also had some problems with plug-ins taking the site down so I moved the whole site all over to Perch. I think it’s important to use the tools you recommend to other people. It gives my clients confidence to know I’m using Perch for my own projects.

martynjacksoncakes.co.uk – I’ve just finished a small responsive site for a local cake company based in Stockport. This is the kind of project that Perch really excels at. All the cake image thumbnails, which had to be a uniform size, were created from the larger images, which were all different sizes, using a Perch template with crop set to true. This is the first site I’ve implemented the Forms app on and I was delighted, but not surprised, at how straightforward it was.

daikinmarsh.co.uk – a responsive portfolio site for a Freelance TV Director. For this site Daikin needed a way to display clips from his Vimeo account so I created a Perch template that simply required him to input the Vimeo clip number.

Why did you choose Perch?

Before I found Perch I’d tried and tested countless content management systems, none of which I was totally happy to recommend to clients. Most of the solutions I tried were too big and bulky and some were downright confusing. I found Perch light, easy-to-implement and more importantly, easy for the client. I know there are free content management systems available but I’d much rather pay a small fee for a well-written and well-supported product that I’ve got total confidence in.

How did you find working with Perch?

I’ve usually got a massive grin on my face when I use Perch. I’m not a geeky person but I get excited about stuff that does a job and does it elegantly. When a site goes live I usually spend about half an hour with a client to show them Perch and ten minutes in they’re usually smiling too! Whenever I’ve been faced with a tricky challenge during a build I’ve always found a solution pretty quickly from the excellent support forums or the supporting documents. What I find particularly refreshing about Perch is that it doesn’t force you to design your sites in a certain way, it just fits nicely into your current workflow.

How do the content creators find working with Perch?

To be honest I very rarely get any “How do I…” type questions but any I do get are usually answered in a matter of minutes. It’s nice to drop in on client’s sites and see that they’re successfully updating content.