Fulldev is a technology and design company based in Groningen, and active throughout the Netherlands. Known for their down-to-earth approach to their work, they aim to create beautiful, functional, and effective websites — and CloudCannon has been their CMS of choice for several years.

A CMS to support growth and stack changes

Fulldev Lead Developer Sil Veltman started using CloudCannon to build websites with Jekyll, before moving first to Eleventy, and then to Astro. Despite migrating between static site generators as development tools evolved, Sil’s experience with CloudCannon has stayed consistent throughout the years.

According to Sil, there are two main reasons he and his team have kept using CloudCannon: the simplicity and intuitive nature of the CMS, and its top-tier support. “The main thing I love about CloudCannon is that my clients just get it, which saves me a lot of time.” For Sil, who started out as a solo freelancer, having that extra time to pour back into his development work was very valuable.

Secondly, CloudCannon’s support has always been there for Sil and his team, for big and small questions.

I’ve often told people in my network that in terms of the team and the support, CloudCannon, I think, is my favorite company right now.

Sil’s company has grown over that time, too — from a one-man show to a team of up to five people, depending on the project. Together with CloudCannon to handle content and staging workflows, Sil and his team have been able to turn out beautiful and performant websites for businesses as varied as an antique building material vendor, Amsterdam’s leading Miele dealer, a Friesland boat rental company, and an improvisational theater group.

Bespoke designs for every site

Many clients who come to Fulldev are pleasantly surprised by the team’s readiness to build from the ground up. It’s partly because Sil and the team have taken great pains to build out the most flexible design system they can, and partly because they genuinely enjoy designing and engineering improvements for their clients — as well as their clients’ customers.

For those clients who come from WordPress expecting a similar CMS experience, Sil has a confident message:

And my clients who are switching from WordPress to our system? I can 100 percent assure them that [Astro and CloudCannon] is going to be better than what they currently have. It’s always true.

Configure your CMS and your publishing workflow

CloudCannon’s highly configurable CMS is another drawcard. Whenever Sil receives questions from his clients, asking how or where to edit something, it’s easy for him to add editor links, change the configuration of the CMS, and make it work for his users.

On that note, what’s his favorite editor feature of CloudCannon? The sidebar, which shows a great deal of contextual information about a page, including front matter and data.

What I really love about how the sidebar of CloudCannon works is that it's clean and straightforward. When you open an object it slides into a new panel which removes distractions. It's just a very clean object.

Sil also discovered CloudCannon’s staging and branching features early on in his time with the CMS. Since then, he has set up publishing workflows on every single Fulldev site he ships, reasoning that development updates should be evaluated before being shipped to production, and that content editors should have the choice to see their content changes on a draft site before publication:

I just always apply [a staging site] because sometimes I push an update to the website when the client wants something changed, and I don't want it going directly to the production branch. And why not just give the user a staging branch too?

Why not, indeed? Custom publication workflows allow everyone to publish changes with confidence — and with Fulldev and CloudCannon, they’re easy to set up.