Why We Retired a CMS We Spent Decades Building
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Published 01 Feb 2026, 00:00
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In 1998, there was no WordPress. No Squarespace. No Webflow. If you wanted a website that a non-technical person could update, you either paid a developer every time you needed a change, or you built the tools yourself. So that's what we did. We called it iASP™. It was a content management system built from scratch by our in-house dev team, and over the next two decades it powered hundreds of websites for businesses, government organisations, and community groups across Australia, New Zealand, the US and the UK. It handled everything — templating, forms, image management, hosting, email — all from a single, integrated platform. For a long time, it was exactly the right tool for the job. ## What changed The short answer: everything around it. The web moved from simple brochure sites to complex, performance-critical experiences. Browsers evolved. Mobile became dominant. Security expectations shifted from "nice to have" to "non-negotiable." And the tooling available to web professionals went from scarce to extraordinary. Maintaining a proprietary CMS means maintaining everything. Every security patch. Every browser compatibility fix. Every hosting environment update. That overhead doesn't scale, and eventually it starts pulling time and energy away from the work that actually matters: focusing on better outcomes for our clients. ## The key realisation The best thing we could do for our clients wasn't to keep improving our own platform. It was to give them access to the best tools and platforms available. ## Why not just switch to WordPress? We considered it. WordPress powers a huge percentage of the web and has a massive ecosystem. But after three decades in this industry, we've seen the hidden costs of traditional CMS platforms up close: the plugin conflicts, the security vulnerabilities, the performance overhead, the update treadmill. We wanted something fundamentally different. We wanted to give clients websites that were faster, more secure, and less expensive to maintain — not just a different flavour of the same complexity. ## Where we landed Today, our stack is simple and deliberate. We use Claude by Anthropic as an AI design and development partner. We use Webflow for sites that need a CMS. And we host on Cloudflare, which gives us global edge delivery, automatic SSL, and DDoS protection with zero server maintenance. For many clients, we go even simpler: a beautifully designed corporate website hosted directly on Cloudflare's edge network. No database. No server. No attack surface. Just a fast, clean website that loads in milliseconds anywhere in the world. ## What we learned Retiring iASP™ wasn't a failure — it was a recognition that the landscape had changed. The same instinct that led us to build our own CMS in 1998 (because nothing good enough existed) now tells us to use the best available tools (because exceptional options exist today). If your business is still running on an ageing platform — whether it's a proprietary system, an outdated WordPress install, or something held together with plugins and hope — you don't have to stay there. The modern web is faster, simpler, and more capable than it's ever been. You just need someone who's been around long enough to know which tools are worth trusting.
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We built iASP™ in the late 1990s and it served hundreds of clients for over two decades. Walking away from it wasn't easy — but it was the right call.
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Migrated from live enotia.com.au
tony · 26 Mar 2026, 02:28