Why Business Catalyst sucks Business catalyst theme development is a web publishing platform originally developed by a couple of Australians in 2004, but was acquired by Adobe Systems in 2009. It promises to be an all-in-one solutions for business websites (theres your red flag right there)with tight integration with its online store, tracking and analytics.1. Modern design meets software from the 90s It actually looks pretty nice, but the interface is pretty horrible and it reminds you of what using web software felt like in the early 00s and the structure of the software feels like its from the 90s2. It uses tables extensivelyfor the front end content and you cant customize them away. Eg. The product list and product view get wrapped in tables and theres no way to customize them away. Also, you will not have any way of referencing one table and not the other with CSS since the same table classes wrap a product lits and a single product.3. The admin UI sucks.It looks nice on the surface and at first glance you get a positive vibe, but as soon as you try to do anything, you need to click at least 4 times to access everything and there are inconsistencies and confusion everywhere.4. The admin interface uses frames. Need I say more?5. The templating language isnt a language.It only uses tags, so you are unable to create any conditional statements. All the logic youll ever want to do in templates will have to be done using Javascript, which is the primary reason youll find many examples of JS/CSS hacks when you google around for problems.6. Pricing.Were already at number six and I havent mentioned the price. Well, all I can say is that its not cheap.7. Rudimentary API.Their ecommerce API has 6 function calls and theyre all related to product/catalog information.8. Lack of flexibility.The built in Contact form application forces you require a title, name & last name. On the positive side you can create many kinds of forms, however, they all have this limitation.9. Only a basic WYSIWYG editor.BC obviously doesnt have a lot of SEO or semantic web oriented user base since the WYSIWYG editor isnt very paragraph-oriented youll need to add them manually.10. A closed platform.Since its a closed platform you wont have any developers working on cool plugins or anything value adding beyond what Adobe can deliver. Compared to open source solutions like Wordpress, Drupal, Plone, etc, it looks pretty late to the game. This also means that there isnt a plethora of blogs out there covering how to do X in BC, so youll have to make do with their online forum or the support channels.11. Business catalyst theme development, editing is achieved through the WYSIWYG editor.12. Bonus point:Lack of ready-made custom themes out there. This is mostly attributed to the small user base and Id say its a typical problem compared to the small number of users. Business catalyst theme development is not just a web hosting for Muse Business Catalyst is NOT simply a codeless website builder. It is not computer software. It is a service (SaaS) Business Catalyst is ideal for professional web developers who may use stock themes, but understand the code and extending functionality Business Catalyst websites cannot be edited with Muse You cannot move Business Catalyst websites from Adobe but you can transfer BC sites to another Adobe partner. Because Business Catalyst is hosted in the Cloud, with seamless integration, it does not require manual critical software updates. Business Catalyst has integrated CMS (plus many other features which can include a Blog) Business Catalyst is hosted on AWS (Amazon Web servers) Business Catalyst has a continuous rolling 90 day backup of web pages with one click restore.See more on Business catalyst theme development at businesscatalystprogrammers.Article Source: businesscatalystprogrammers.