Adobe Shuts Down Muse Website Platform

Seattle, WA - On March 26, Adobe announced the discontinuation of its Muse website builder. Once hailed as a simple way to build and develop websites without needing to code.

For a corporation to be dominant in the website builder and CMS platform segments, their constant innovation and growth percentages year-over-year need to be significant. To compete with the largest platforms like WordPress, those year-over-year growth figures need to be in the high single to low double-digit range. As a benchmark, W3Techs reports WordPress holds a 30 percent market share and has consistently grown 2-4 percent over the last seven years. In comparison, Adobe Muse registered a mere .2 percent growth figure in the last year, which was in line with many of the second-tier content management systems. In comparison, the DIY website builder Squarespace's market share grew from .5 percent to .9 percent over the last year.

"The website builder space is a constantly evolving segment requiring constant modernization, attention to shifts in technology, best web practices and ultimately consumers who land on the website or landing page," says Mark Michael, CEO of DevHub. In order to maintain customers, platforms need to focus on its user experience (UX) and widgets, integration partnerships and stay current and responsive to fixing bugs and updating the platform. Most website platforms are built to manage websites at scale which means they need to attract a large enough audience of businesses, agencies and developers to generate a respectable level of profitability. In the case of Adobe Muse, it seems they were able to create a small loyal base of users and developers, however not at the scale needed to return profits at a level acceptable to shareholders.

Like many website builders and CMS systems, there are lines of proprietary code making migration from Muse to another platform a more complex issue. When combined with the shutdown of Adobe Business Catalyst, their hosting and analytics platform, many agencies, businesses and developers have been left out in the cold. With a forced migration necessary for potentially hundreds of thousands of websites, marketers are scrambling to find efficient and effective alternatives.

"We've migrated from most legacy website builders and CMS platforms, re-platforming content from one CMS to another can be easy and safe," says Mark Michael. With DevHub's migration platform, we are able to recreate most everything from an existing website, often with more flexibility and added analytical tools and web standards - baked in on day one."

"The good news is that we have 10+ years of experience in doing cms platform migrations - we've built proprietary tools to greatly simplify the process, reducing potential downtime, lost revenue and traffic. Rather than taking months, our approach reduces a migration process to mere weeks even with a hundred thousand or more sites. With DevHub, 99 percent of migrations are aligned with current look and feel, speeding the process and maintaining site functionality, Daniel Rust CTO DevHub shares.

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