After over a year of designing, coding, planning, and beta testing, we’re very excited to announce the launch of HiFi CMS. You can now Try HiFi free for 30 days.

As a web design firm who launches more than 100 sites per year, we recognized the need for a truly modern CMS in the market that places equal emphasis on usability, flexibility, and scalability.  For the past year, our team has worked diligently to build a powerful system that could be leveraged by developers, designers, and marketers around the world.

HiFi has already been used by our team and beta users to launch over 50 production websites like PBS' CiaoItalia.com. We're confident HiFi is ready for you and your clients' websites.

Why will you love HiFi?

1. You control 100% of your markup. Moving to HTML5? No problem. There aren't code 'injection points' or crazy PHP methods like 'wp_dropdown_categories'. Just your clean, beautiful markup.
2. Easy Templating.HiFi's templating system couldn't be easier.  The template extension system lets you define templates with a minimal amount of code, letting you build better websites quicker.
3. Powerful API.  At the core of HiFi is its flexible and impressive API that gives you template-level access, allowing you to get all of your site's data with a simple call. 
4. Your clients will just "get it". The simple but powerful user-interface will allow your clients to take ownership of their websites with less training and support from you.
5. Start working on your next project immediately. No server administration necessary. Leave server maintenance, backups and restorations, and software upgrades to us.
6. We care about great websites. HiFi isn't a better cookie cutter. It's a better workbench. The tools to support your professional work are within arm's reach. We care about the details like automatic CSS and JS compilation and minification, template defined image resizing on the fly, a flexible API, and more.

We truly believe that HiFi will help web professionals around the world build better websites for their clients.  Give us a try and tell us what you think.

This site was just featured on Design Shack, a gallery of the best designs around the web.  Currently, we're holding down a solid 8.5 rating based on user votes -- we encourage you all to go check out the listing and rate our design.

This listing is yet another testament to the flexibility of HiFi CMS.  It demonstrates that a design can be detailed and perfected enough to be listed in respected galleries, and still be managed by a powerful CMS.  So many systems restrict what you can do with the templating that you could never launch something worthy of being featured on a popular showcase.  We took the opposite approach, allowing free templating and pushing web standards, which makes it easy designers to publish work that can be highlighted on design, HTML, and CSS galleries around the web.

If you're visiting from Design Shack -- welcome!  Take a tour around the site, learn about the system, and be sure to sign up for updates and announcments.

Thanks again for all of your support!  Also, a big shout out to Lenny Terenzi who put together the HiFi design!

As we’ve built out the HiFi Content Management System, we’re always working to make sure we’re including the most important features that allow users to fully leverage their websites.  Furthermore, our web development company has built hundreds of sites on various versions of our previous Content Management System and got a boat load of feedback on which features were the most important, helpful, and powerful.

Below is a list I compiled of eight very important elements – I hesitate to call the most important, because that is different to different users.  However, these are definitely eight that you should definitely not build a site without.  Also, I've eschewed listing some of the no-brainers such as WYSIWYG editor and password protected admin area.

1. RSS Feeds – The CMS should automatically generate RSS feeds from all of the sections of the site.  Most people tend to just make sure the Blog can generate a feed, but it’s important to ensure that feeds can be generated from anywhere.  This feature is critical when trying to push the latest news to the homepage, automatically pull new media onto your Facebook page, and more.
2. SEO Control – One of the biggest benefits of a CMS is that it allows your organization to do the hardest part of SEO on your own: create content.  However, it’s also important that the site give you control over other important SEO data, such as meta descriptions and title tags.  To fully optimize your content and draw in leads, you need to have access to all of your SEO elements.
3. Clean URLs – This element goes hand in hand with SEO control, but is important enough to also list on its own.  Check out the URLS the CMS creates and look at a few things: 1) they’re not too long, 2) they’re English and could be understood by a person, 3) they can be customized if need be.  Too many CMS’ generate sloppy URLs, which ruin any effort at optimization.
4. Design Independence – The system needs to be accommodating to any type of design, as design remains an important aspect of visitors’ decision-making process on whether to buy what you’re selling, contact your company, or browse through your content.  Don’t underestimate the importance of design; many systems restrict designers/developers and make them design for the system rather than for the brand.
5. Different Tiers of User Access – A “super admin” needs to be able to delegate different roles to other administrators.  You don’t want admins (or interns) poking around in areas of the site that aren’t relative to them or contain more sensitive information.  A system should let you control what content administrators can see and update.
6. Simple Form Builder – While there are many really great form building solutions out there, such as Wufoo, it’s important that your CMS have the ability to construct at least simple forms.  It gets tedious to always have to login (and pay) to outside vendors to build a form and gather data, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to do it from the CMS.
7. Speed and Performance – This one seems to get underestimated by a lot of people, but is a huge deal.  I’ve been bogged down in some systems where it takes several minutes to just get to the page I want to edit.  This sloth should be a deal breaker.  If a CMS can’t perform its main duty speedily and reliably, then that’s typically just an indicator of things to come with that system and company – not to mention it’s really annoying and inefficient
8. Incorporate Plugins – The system should have demonstrated its ability to scale through plugins.  No base CMS will solve every possible website problem, and you should be wary of anything that claims it does.  However, the CMS needs to be open enough that your developers or the CMS company can incorporate plugins that can help improve and scale your site as needed over time.

Does your current CMS really excel without any of these features?  Did I leave off some critical features that should be incorporated in this list?  Later, I’ll be doing a post on the features that aren’t really as important as you might think.