How well do CMS vendors "eat their own dog food?" That's the question some analysts and bloggers have been asking recently.  Do vendors use their own system to run their Web sites, and further, how do their sites stack up to various tests from best practices such as standards compliance in page markup?  A recent test run by Kas Thomas highlights one issue we faced here at Percussion when the "dog food" question came up for the new Percussion.com site. To his credit, Kas understands the scores he came up with are fraught with caveats, but in our case, there's an ironic twist about the reasons why.

As a vendor, we already had plenty of customer sites that could show things like accessibility compliance, high performance, or platform flexibility.  Because of our architecture, Percussion is best known for our technical expertise at optimizing site load in the delivery tier, XML, and standards compliance. In fact, because of that technical XML heritage, some reports raised questions about how easy it would be to do the "unstructured" or non-compliant type things using Percussion.We realized our site needed to be a showcase of not simply the types of things web sites need to do to be effective, but a showcase of HOW those features can be accomplished with our system.  

So we decided to make our site more open to investigation of "how" and specifically to use third party tools in an open "as is" manner. In short, we decided to take "eating our own dog food" to another level - by making our actual live site our demo site as well.

To do that, we had to make trade-offs between optimizing things and leaving them more bare so visitors could see how it was done. The JS libraries we used and third party tools in particular are left open and un-obfuscated.  They are not consolidated and are placed more for easy decomposition than for optimization.  We faced similar trade offs on compliance and markup - show best practice, or show it can be done however you want it? In the end we did a mix. Some areas of the site score very high, others not so much.  Taking the "dog food" concept one step further, we even put a "how and why" feature in to help get visitors exploring the features in more detail - not in a separate demo, but right on the live site.  It's a feature we intend to expand with even more detail.

At Percussion, we believe Web sites should be tailored to specific business objectives.  As a vendor, our goal is to help you see how the Percussion CM System can deliver this for your site.  Relegating that to a separate "demo" site would miss the mark. In the end, "eating our own dog food" meant doing some things the way our customers would NOT do them. We felt we could make the trade-offs between the openness that we sought without compromising the resulting load times.  So far, that has been the case.  

Who knows, maybe next we'll do a special dedicated "optimized site" that hides everything - kind of a demo site in reverse!