I stumbled across Light CMS the other day and after being sceptical at first I looked closer at it and recognized how it actually offered the potential to make a half decent profit if you used it for several clients.

 

To make things clear I am in no way comparing it to Wordpress/Drupal which are great don't get me wrong but if it's just a simple 5-10 page 'static' site that you are making for a client it is a bit of a pain to integrate it into a complex CMS for such a small website.

 

So you could either just code it as a normal html/css website or use some of the many free lightweight CMS out there such as Cushy and SimpleCMS which offer editing usually based on adding a class or comment tag around the content you want to edit.

 

LightCMS still works off these principles by using it's own unique tag to define editable regions but how it's different is it's interface. Once you have set up your template the client can edit text just by clicking on a paragraph, drag and drop boxes around the page adding in complex forms is made easy and much more.

 

And what I think possibly the best part about it is the site is hosted by LightCMS themselves so bandwidth is never an issue and they let you decide the prices to charge per month to your clients. How this works is basically LightCMS charge a fee of say for example $19 a month for their second lowest plan but what you can do is charge your client say $30 a month. LightCMS will bill the client, take their $19 and pay your the remanding sum which in this case is $11 every month. I'm sure as you can imagine if you had say 10 clients on the system it could prove to be quite profitable and you can still charge them for the original design of the site as well.

 

I've never used it personally but I am considering using it on the next 'small' site I make for a client to see how it goes.

 

What do you think ?

I would much rather use an open source lightweight CMS hosted on my own server. Who wants another company billing their client for a web site? Not me. Plus, if there are any server issues you have no guarantee of getting the support you need when you need it. And if it's just a 5-10 page website, the bandwidth is going to be minimal anyway, so I really can't see a scenario where I'd even think about using a service like this.