Why We Built Our Own CMS | Digital Marmalade [Skip to main content](#main-content) Every agency that builds websites has a position on content management systems. Most reach for one of the established platforms — WordPress, Craft, Contentful, Sanity — and there are good reasons for that. They're proven, well-documented, and most clients have heard of at least one of them. The case for building your own CMS has to be pretty compelling to outweigh those advantages. Ours was. Marmalade Suite is the CMS that Digital Marmalade builds many of its client sites on. It's not a product we sell separately or a platform other agencies build on — it's the editorial infrastructure we've developed to solve the specific problems that kept showing up when we used other systems. The problem with general-purpose tools --------------------------------------- Off-the-shelf CMS platforms are designed to work for as many different use cases as possible. That's what makes them popular, and it's also what makes them frustrating for clients with specific needs. A platform that can power a personal blog and a large enterprise site tends to handle both well enough, and neither brilliantly. The parts that don't quite fit get worked around — either through plugins that add complexity, through custom development on top of the platform that gets increasingly tangled over time, or through asking clients to adapt their workflows to the tool rather than the other way around. The thing that matters most to an editorial team is that the CMS makes their actual job easier. Not that it's well-documented, not that there's a large support community, not that their IT department has approved it. If the interface is confusing, if updates break things, if managing a particular kind of content requires a workaround — these things create friction every working day, and they accumulate. What Marmalade Suite solves --------------------------- Marmalade Suite was built around the real editorial tasks our clients carry out rather than a hypothetical general case. For a client like [Medindex](../../portfolio), whose CMS needs to support multiple clinical contributors updating time-sensitive healthcare content across different NHS areas, the editorial interface has to be clear, reliable and built around their specific workflow — not the nearest approximation a general platform could provide. The same logic applies across very different kinds of sites. The content types, the publishing workflow, the permissions structure, the way media is managed — these differ significantly between a luxury brand site, a clinical information platform and a knowledge repository with thousands of articles. Marmalade Suite can be configured to each without the layers of plugin dependencies and custom workarounds that build up when you're pushing a general platform to do something it wasn't quite designed for. When bespoke CMS development makes sense ---------------------------------------- Building your own CMS is not the right answer for every project, and we're honest about that. If a client's requirements map well to an existing platform, using that platform is usually the faster and cheaper option — and faster and cheaper matters. The case for bespoke CMS development is strongest when the editorial workflow is complex or specific, when the content model doesn't fit neatly into standard page-and-post structures, when the client has ongoing maintenance needs that off-the-shelf systems handle badly, or when performance and security requirements sit above what a general platform can reliably deliver. For the clients we work with most often, those conditions come up regularly. Marmalade Suite is the result of solving the same problems across many different projects and building something that handles them properly, rather than starting from scratch or reaching for a workaround each time. If you're starting a new build and weighing up your CMS options, it's a conversation worth having before the decision gets made by default. [Get in touch](../../contact) or take a look at our [services](../../services) to see how we approach this. [ Back to news ](/news) October 2026 ### [ What Building Software for Regulated Industries Actually Requires ](https://www.digitalmarmalade.co.uk/news/what-building-software-for-regulated-industries-actually-requires) Read more September 2026 ### [ How a Digital Brand Stays Itself Since 2001 ](https://www.digitalmarmalade.co.uk/news/how-a-digital-brand-stays-itself-since-2001) Read more September 2026 ### [ Designing Digital Products for Children: What Changes ](https://www.digitalmarmalade.co.uk/news/designing-digital-products-for-children-what-changes) Read more Allow cookies