People love Perch - Mat Ranson

We love to hear how much People love Perch and this interview is with Mat Ranson of Mandala Studio.

Tell us a bit about yourself:

I’m Mat Ranson. I co-run Mandala Studio with my partner Izabella Bielawska. We’re a graphic design studio in Bangkok. Recently we worked on a project of our own creation, with a local developer (who is also a fan of Perch), called Cinematic. It’s a movie listings site updated daily, collecting together on one page all movies and times for cinemas in Bangkok.

What sites have you used Perch for recently?

I used Perch to build our new company portfolio site. It was intended to be a minimal design showcasing our work, with a blog so we can occasionally talk about what we’re doing and publicise new work.

Why did you choose Perch?

Someone recommended Perch to me about 2 years ago as a nice framework to start practising my site building skills. But it wasn’t until recently when someone else recommended Perch and I was really on the lookout for something that I took the plunge. I research a few different CMSs but it was a combination of price, the fact that it ran in a database (and not from Dropbox like some of the other simple CMSs I looked at) and nice stories I heard about tech support that persuaded me.

How did you find working with Perch?

I have some experience messing about with PHP so I didn’t feel out of my depth. But as a designer-doing-my-own-build there were some other small tech-y hurdles I think could have been avoided if there was a simple explanation (like setting up a virtual host properly to avoid directory structure problems further down the line). But they are learning curve issues and like any problem, with the solution comes the knowledge you know how to handle it in the future. Other than that, Perch didn’t get in the way of the design I wanted to implement, and in a few scenarios actually provided ideas I never thought of. When I had issues customer support was outstanding. To the point I wondered how you guys had chance to get anything else done apart from fielding questions all day in the forums!

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

Well, this is mainly me, but my partner also got involved in adding content and didn’t break anything so that was a relief!