Below the Fold: Walking the CMS Tightrope
My corner of this blog, Below the Fold, is for web designers about issues they have told us are critical to their business. I am keeping a running list and invite you to add to it right here.
Appropriately, this first post is about whether clients really need full content management systems (CMS) [full disclosure: Webvanta has, among its many features, a full content management system]. Do clients need more than simple text editing? Is the cost and complication of building or buying and then customizing a CMS necessary? Are clients’ needs today just the tip of the iceberg for what they will need next year?
Unless your client has a five page “brochure” Web site that only gets edited once a year, sooner or later they will need, and probably demand, a content management system. It is inevitable and in your best interest to set them up with one. Empowering clients to make their own basic edits not only delights them, but makes them grateful to you. Contrary to what some think, it will make them more rather than less dependent on you. They now see both a public Web site and their own back-end that you have provided and help maintain for them. Finally, a good content management system gives you complete control of who edits what and can vary for every client depending on their needs, skills, budget, and site complexity.
Here are some resources to help you ask your clients the right questions.
- thinkvitamin identifies 5 hidden costs to consider when evaluating a CMS. Worth adding into your evaluation.
- Jeffrey Veen interviewed by Adaptive Path believes CMS installations that fail quickly usually do so due to the learning curve of building a complex “platform” with instructions written by engineers to be interpreted by writers, designers, and managers.
- A List Apart summarizes the good and bad news for designers of CMS (Hint: the bad news isn’t that bad for great designers).
- JoAnn T. Hackos in Content Management for Dynamic Web Delivery helps match up content management systems with the kind of content your client has. Aligning the type of CMS with the type of content makes sense.
Please share your own learning or helpful resources. <Out />
Reader Comments
2 comments
Advice on content organization
From: Dave, 02/20/09 11:02 AM
Based on the articles referenced in my blog post, a couple of thoughts:
Good luck and let me know how it goes.
Seek advice
From: Richard Mains, 02/19/09 11:31 AM
Dave, we’ve launched the Commercial Space Gateway (http://commercialspacegateway.com) and are up to our ears in negotiating with Author-Analysts to help create internal content, adding new content (easy to do, but there is too much of it), and marketing the site to potential paying sponsors who are stakeholders in this emerging market. If you have time to scan the site, and you know we are the “company” using the CMS, what counsel can you provide us from the above info sources that we should know about, thanks.