Strategy · February 2026
We built iASP™ in the late 1990s and it served hundreds of clients for over two decades. Walking away from it wasn’t easy, but it was the right call.
In 1998, there was no WordPress. No Squarespace. No Webflow. If you wanted a website that a non-technical person could update, you either paid a developer every time you needed a change, or you built the tools yourself. So that’s what we did.
We called it iASP™. It was a content management system built from scratch by our in-house dev team, and over the next two decades it powered hundreds of websites for businesses, government organisations, and community groups across Australia, New Zealand, the US and the UK. It handled everything, templating, forms, image management, hosting, email, all from a single, integrated platform.
For a long time, it was exactly the right tool for the job.
The short answer: everything around it. The web moved from simple brochure sites to complex, performance-critical experiences. Browsers evolved. Mobile became dominant. Security expectations shifted from “nice to have” to “non-negotiable.” And the tooling available to web professionals went from scarce to extraordinary.
Maintaining a proprietary CMS means maintaining everything. Every security patch. Every browser compatibility fix. Every hosting environment update. That overhead doesn’t scale, and eventually it starts pulling time and energy away from the work that actually matters: focusing on better outcomes for our clients.
We considered it. WordPress powers a huge percentage of the web and has a massive ecosystem. But after three decades in this industry, we’ve seen the hidden costs of traditional CMS platforms up close: the plugin conflicts, the security vulnerabilities, the performance overhead, the update treadmill.
We wanted something fundamentally different. We wanted to give clients websites that were faster, more secure, and less expensive to maintain, not just a different flavour of the same complexity.
Our stack is simple and deliberate. We use Claude by Anthropic as an AI design and development partner. We host on Cloudflare, which gives us global edge delivery, automatic SSL, and DDoS protection with zero server maintenance.
For content management, we evaluated Webflow. It was a generational improvement over what came before, and credit where credit is due. But Webflow didn’t yet deliver the Next-generation capabilities clients deserve: drafting content from natural language, and automated layout intelligence that turns flat copy into beautifully presented pages. We weren’t prepared to wait. So we did what Enotia has always done. We built it.
We called it Eddie. Eddie, the brand-aware editor inside Enotia Ops, drafts content from natural language prompts. The Enotia Ops publishing workflow turns flat content into polished page layouts. Currently in beta release, Eddie and Enotia Ops are the migration target for our iASP™ clients ahead of iASP™'s end-of-2026 retirement, and a first-mover advantage for everyone else. A WordPress plug-in is on the 2026 roadmap.
For many clients, we still go even simpler: a beautifully designed corporate website hosted directly on Cloudflare’s edge network. No database. No server. No attack surface. Just a fast, clean website that loads in milliseconds anywhere in the world. Eddie and Enotia Ops are for the clients who genuinely need a CMS. Both are right, depending on what the business actually needs.
Retiring iASP™ wasn’t a failure. It was a recognition that the landscape had changed. The same instinct that led us to build our own CMS in 1998 (because nothing good enough existed) led us to retire it in 2025 (because exceptional options now existed), and then to build Eddie in 2026 (because the market still hadn’t delivered what clients deserve).
The pattern isn’t indecision. It’s the same conviction, applied honestly at each turn: use the best tool available, and when the market hasn’t built it, build it.
If your business is still running on an ageing platform, whether it’s a proprietary system, an outdated WordPress install, or something held together with plugins and hope, you don’t have to stay there. The modern web is faster, simpler, and more capable than it’s ever been. You just need someone who’s been around long enough to know which tools are worth trusting, and who’s willing to build a better one when none of them are.
Whether you need a clean corporate website, a content-driven solution, or advice about something more complex, we’d love to hear from you.