Content Management Systems
CMS: Power to the People? or A License to Kill?
On the whole, we’ll go on the record and say we’re pro-CMS. After all it’s hard to build new and fabulous websites when your inbox is cluttered with requests to change this or that word on a website. So in that respect, please be our guest and edit away!
However there are pros and cons to managing your site in-house. Here are some considerations to help you decide whether a CMS will benefit you or not.
1. How often is the site updated – really?
If you’re an association constantly communicating with your membership and other stakeholders, it’s a no-brainer! And depending on your needs, you may be a candidate for a more robust application to handle those needs. However if your site rarely changes and is very design driven, it may be more trouble than it’s worth. If you’re wondering, ‘how do I do this again?’ in your annual update, a list of changes fired off to your web developer may be the most efficient use of resources, yield better results and who knows, your developer may even have a fresh idea for you.
2. Do you have the resources to support in-house management?
In most small and medium sized business the role of website manager generally falls to an IT or marketing staffer in addition to their other responsibilities. Simply put, managing the website requires time and some skill. Otherwise the investment you’ve made in your website is squandered as mistakes and a failure to adhere to design guidelines renders the site a shadow of its former self. On the other hand, the right person with the required time to keep the site in tip-top shape could ramp up results. It all comes down to picking the right person with the right skills (some technical, some marketing and some writing) and a manager that understands the time required to be successful at this.
3. Understanding the “M” in CMS
CMS’s often fall short of users’ expectations usually because they haven’t been given enough training or they forget the critical initial – “M” – for management. A CMS allows website managers to manage the existing content, but for the most part it’s not for creation – and that’s a good thing. If your web developer is worth his or her salts, they’ve meticulously planned the organization of the site to make your content as simple to access as humanly possible. Without web development expertise however, that investment will quickly render that planning moot as editors create a tangle of links that bears no relationship to the navigation or other content, end up with broken bits on the page, etc. A good CMS will allow some controlled content creation, like press releases, but puts the brakes on site destroying experiments.
4. Enabling the focussed marketer
For those clients committed to monitoring and managing their sites based on tracking analytics and SEO, brand consistency and the site’s relation to offline activities, the CMS is a godsend as it ensures the site is up to date and tweaked to maximize opportunity.
5. The CMS/web developer relationship
A good CMS + a skilled and trained web content manager + your web developer = success. If you embrace item number 3, you’ll embrace that your relationship with your web developer is an enduring one (which underscores the need to choose people you like to work with!). In a perfect web world, your web developer will help with your more technical needs beyond editing the existing content. Things like creating new pages, adding new applications and forms, maybe even assisting in editing and embedding images – a surprisingly common need. And once a year or so it’s good to have your developer take a tour through your entire site and do a little a spring cleaning. After all, we’re fuss budgets at heart so we’ll clean up little digressions that may not bother you but can drive us to drink! That third party tour will catch glitches you may not see any more after looking at your site so often and will return it to all its glory.
6. CMS and SEO – Choosing the right CMS matters
Many CMSs are essentially big databases of content considered “dynamic” pages because depending on what the visitor requests, that content gets pulled from the database and dropped into a template. Here’s the problem, these dynamic pages are not SEO friendly. Does that mean a CMS is out? No way! It just requires a solution that meets both needs so that your pages appear to Google as standard static pages.
Do you have a question about integrating a CMS into your web plans? Ask us a question or give us shout!
