White Whale regularly works with schools that have already chosen (or are already committed to) a CMS. In fact, if you’re not going to use LiveWhale, then we’d generally prefer you have your CMS selected when we come on board, as we’ve got experience crafting great sites on any CMS. In the past few years we’ve designed sites implemented in Drupal, WordPress, Ektron, Ingeniux and dotCMS among others. These systems all have their pros and cons, but we’ve been able to create great work on all of them.
We created LiveWhale specifically because we have detected broad dissatisfaction, both among our client base and in the industry in general, with both existing commercial and open source CMS solutions. The former tend to be proprietary, closed systems with nebulous pricing configurations and less than cutting-edge technology; the latter tend to take months to customize and roll out, and the cost of the learning curve adds considerably to the nominally “free†price tag. So we’re trying to shake up the marketplace a bit, by offering something with enormous flexibility, no restrictions on its per-site usage, crystal clear pricing, and active support from the individuals who created it. We’re trying to get at the best of both these worlds.