8 Reasons to Dump Adobe Muse Today!

 8/16/2018 12:00:00 AM
Views: 10,775
5 Minutes, 58 Second
 Written By John Marx
Tags:Adobe Muse

8 Reasons to Dump Adobe Muse Today!

One of the biggest aspects of our company lately is converting Adobe Muse sites to a full-fledged content management system (CMS). But why would we be switching new clients from Adobe Muse to another system even when they had their website built in the last six months? The reasoning is shocking in some aspects yet not so much in other aspects. Let's look at the top 10 reasons you should be dumping Adobe Muse if your business is running it today.

No longer under active development

In an announcement directly from Adobe they state "On March 26, 2018, we will release the final feature improvement release of Adobe Muse. We will continue to offer technical support to all active Creative Cloud customers until May 20, 2019." This means no new features and most likely limited updates will be done. We can see only security updates coming from this date forward.

Adobe's statement on development support is "We will continue to repair critical issues (related to security, payments or customer data for example) when they appear, however, the work will be limited to bugs that have a high security or high stability risk. We will not be fixing minor items with small impact or that have a workaround which can be used." which came from the Business Catalyst FAQ page at https://www.businesscatalyst.com/#faq.

Business Catalyst Servers

Any Adobe Muse sites hosted on Business Catalyst will no longer be available. This means your site would go offline. You can always move it to another server but you will lose many of the core capabilities Business Catalyst provided. These are:

  • Flexible, Hosted Content Management
  • Online Store Out of the Box
  • Built-in CRM & Web Form Builder
  • Drive Repeat Sales with Email Marketing
  • Power Modules - Built In
  • Reporting & Analytics
  • Design & Customization

Some important Muse milestones

Adobe continues to add details (and nails) to the coffin of Muse. Here are the important milestones to the demise of Muse.

  • March 26, 2018 - Announcement of Business Catalyst End Of Life date for March 26th 2021.
  • June 18, 2018 - No new trials can be created for Muse test sites.
  • June 18, 2018 - Support is prioritized for platform migration questions, in addition to critical security, compliance, and availability issues.
  • August 27, 2018 - No new sites can be upgraded that were previously trials to paid accounts.
  • August 27, 2018 - All sites will be moving to monthly billing once they reach the end of their subscriptions.
  • March 26, 2021 - All data is removed from the Business Catalyst infrastructure and sites become unavailable for the public.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO

The search engines push out over 300 updates per year. They recommend adding structured meta data, optimizations, etc. Adobe Muse doesn't support this. You need to hack your code and this is a manual situation. Muse though is fast, really fast, as it is just raw HTML (HyperText Markup Language) files. A modern CMS (content management system) has overhead. This overhead will slow a site down. The slowdown is very minimal but the pages are still always going to be slower. So in that regard, your site will be fast for the search engines.

Search

We continue to see Adobe Muse sites with links for search that do nothing or go to a 404-page not found. This is horrible for a user experience. If you are hosted on Business Catalyst this can work to a degree but not as well as you'd hope. Move your site off Business Catalyst and the odds of your search working on pretty close to nil. I say this as we've run into this issue (again) today while writing this article of why you should be dumping Adobe Muse today.

It's DEAD (no really it is)!

Adobe has listened to their community and delayed parts of the items we covered above. They will stop all hosting all Business Catalyst sites on March 26, 2021. Adobe encourages customers to download their data and migrate to other systems well before March 26th, 2021. After this date, all your data will be deleted (no exceptions, no crying, it's just gone!). It also means you are now in for an obsolete website. Of course, you can let your site sit and be obsolete. It happens all the time. In 2018, we have already upgraded four sites from Microsoft Frontpage which was discontinued well over 10 years ago. So yes, you can just let your site sit, don't care about it, and still have a website. That doesn't bod well for your business as a website is designed to be a living system to help you grow your business.

No simple migration path

Being Adobe Muse is a hybrid of HTML5 and Adobe software there is no true migration strategy beyond the "Good luck" mentality. Adobe is providing information as quickly as possible to help businesses realize this and migrate quickly and well before the true EOL (end of life) of the software.

Adobe Muse CRM is dead

CRM or Customer Relationship Management is critical for any business wanting to grow. With the end of life for Adobe Muse, their CRM integration is also ending.

But what's good about Adobe Muse

When Adobe Muse first came out it was a product that no one believed could exist. It created mobile-friendly sites, was fast, and supported by Adobe whose products are lived in by graphic designers each and every day. So what were the key reasons people chose Muse? Let's look and see:

  • No coding
  • No grids
  • Mobile-friendly sites
  • Easy updates
  • Flexibility
  • Create-design-preview at once
  • One-step editing
  • Ease of migration
  • Easy-to-use starter designs
  • Combine with alternate layout

Those are some pretty awesome features that Adobe Muse offered with it's standard and proprietary technologies. Today though you can achieve all of this with the latest technologies without including the proprietary elements.

Conclusion

If you purchased Adobe Muse (not the monthly subscription) it will still work! What you won't be able to do is publish to Business Catalyst. You won't be receiving new features, updates, or any support for it. Migrating to a new platform should be on your radar and each day should be more quickly coming to light for your business.

Not completely bleek

We've talked about the entire process of Adobe killing off Muse. This is strictly a business decision by them as it wasn't financially feasible for a large company. What we appreciate about this is we have the solution for you. This is:

  • Experience in migrating from Adobe Muse
  • A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system that rivals the Adobe Muse system as well as the ability to migrate all your existing CRM information.
  • A completely web based system that grows with you.

Available Service Flyers

Our philosophy has always been honesty (this is our rule #1) and transparency in our services. There's no reason to hide costs unless you have something to hide. We've found that those who hide fees charge more successful businesses more money because they can. We do not feel this is the way America was meant to be. We believe in offering a fair price to everyone for the work that is done.

We also believe that once you sign on with us, you trust us, and as our thank you to you, we "price lock" our services for the plan(s) you signed up for at that time. This means while you are on those services, the price will always be the same. As business owners, we appreciate this as it allows us to budget our business expenses better.