About Us

Oct 29, 2023

This is JoyBird's About Us page, but it should really be an About Me page 😉

My name is Michael, and I'm the solo developer behind this product. Before you run off to find a CMS cobbled together by LargeFacelessCorp, hear me out on why supporting an independent product is good for you.

Your Momma could do it

I'm building JoyBird into something I'd be proud to sign my name to, and that I'd enjoy as a user.

The inspiration for JoyBird came from years of building and maintaining thousands of websites for myself and my clients.

Here's what I experienced:

Content Management Systems always feel clunky and almost hostile to a non-technical user.

That's why a whole industry of Wordpress experts exist, to take care of all the cruft of website management most of us don't want to handle.

Updating plugins, debugging theme conflicts, upgrading servers whenever you get slightly more traffic. Bleh. Yuck.

My guiding principle for JoyBird is that running a website should be so easy, my mom could do it.

Let's call this the Mom test 😇.

Guac is NOT extra

For most websites, you'll need a bunch of important functionality:

  • Make sure my site is fast

  • Absolutely do not crash as soon as my site gets the tiniest increase in traffic I worked so hard for!

  • Have regular backups, in case I stuff something up

  • Automatically optimize for SEO and make my site rank as well as possible on Google

  • Make my site look grrrreeat on mobile

There's lots more.

But you shouldn't have to put up with plugin hell to get the basics.

That's why I'm building JoyBird with these enabled by default, to make running a website easier.

Because why make it hard to add the stuff which everybody needs?

Not your grandma's CMS

Technology moves by leaps and bounds every year.

But Content Management Systems haven't kept up (Happy 20th Birthday Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal! 🥳)

Wouldn't it be great to have a CMS which lets computers / AI do the nitty gritty work so you can focus on writing?

I'm talking about a CMS which:

  • suggests trending blog topics to write about

  • uses AI to generate suitable images and their descriptions

  • automagically links to other articles I've written about

  • analyzes keywords to help my content rank higher

This is what I'm building towards 🤞

___

It will be a long journey, but here are the first steps.

But I hope you will join us as I build JoyBird into a CMS to be proud of. Sign up to be a beta tester and try it out.

DM me on Twitter or email me on mike@joybird.ai for any comments. You could also browse my blog for more on my background.