Your Complex CMS
Your Complex Content Management System is Affecting Your Website’s Content
Web content is closely related to how it is published. If your content management and/or publishing tool are a pain to use, the quality of your content will suffer.
Oddly enough I feel the need to start this article off with “what is content”. My experience with companies who have an enterprise class website has been that website content is defined as just text. Ok, so I know there are those people who still prefer the command-line-interface and prefer to read news groups from the internet this way, but really? The rest of us like to see more colors besides black and digital green (The Matrix?). Simply put, content is way more than text on a page. Web content is the textual, visual or aural content that is encountered as part of the user experience on websites. It may include, among other things: text, images, sounds, videos and animations.
In Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville write, "We define content broadly as 'the stuff in your Web site.' This may include documents, data, applications, e-services, images, audio and video files, personal Web pages, archived e-mail messages, and more. And we include future stuff as well as present stuff."(Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, second edition, page 219) I’ll write a new article that addresses what content is later, but this gives you a pretty solid definition.
With this broad interpretation, content or assets of content can get fairly numerous pretty fast. Managing the archiving, storing, retrieving and searching of content can be fairly complex. Not only that, but editing, adding and removing content becomes challenging, especially if HTML or GUI scripts are involved. Enter the Content Management System…
A content management system is what allows company employees to publish new content to their web sites. These systems eliminate the need for content writers to be concerned with the technical details. And while at first glance, content publishing might not seem like it should be difficult, more detailed examination reveals some of the complexity. First, consider that content comes in many forms:
- articles and white papers
- press release and company news
- pictures
- products information
- frequently asked questions/answers
- email archives and newsgroups
- Flash presentations and online demos
- streaming audio and video
With all these different types of content, there is a need for systems to first create (author) the content, then describe it (metadata tagging), and eventually update it. On top of these basic tasks, the system should also:
- let several people collaborate and edit content together
- provide workflow to let the right people do the right things at the right time
- have security measures to stop the wrong people from manipulating the content
- keep track of changes to the content through the use of versioning
- provide scheduling to control when content is displayed
- use templates to publish the content in a standard format so that a certain look and feel is maintained across the site
- personalize the content so user's can customize the viewing experience
(Marios Alexandrou in Internet Dictionary)
With all of this complexity, the content management system has evolved beyond its main purpose which is to eliminate the need for content writers to be concerned with the technical details of publishing content to the website. A CMS can only be successful if content editors and administrators are willing to use it. This makes usability a very important factor when choosing a system. Additionally, hard to use complex content management systems have a negative impact on the quality of content.
Content owners simply do not have the time to perform too many steps to publish or pre-publish content and when that happens, the responsibility then falls back to the content manager who is consumed with maintaining standards and thinking of strategies for the website overall and therefore doesn’t have time either.
This results in:
- Stale content on the website
- Unedited content on the website
- Content that is thought out or not focused on the proper audience
- Content with incorrect information
- Most notably, content that is late getting to the website
Internally, poor website content and a hard to use complex content management system also results in a loss in reputation and trust in the web team within the company. When that occurs, content will not be designed for the web by content owners, the web becomes last on the list for project managers and eventually content quality will get so bad a new team will be formed and the process will start all over again.
Well, here at NewsomeGraphix we use CMS MS (CMS Made Simple), an open source, easy to use module based content management system. While not an Enterprise Class Content Management System, CMS Made Simple is easy to use, easy to install and comes with an option to download new functionality directly within the admin application. For a mid-size or small company its ease of use beats out Drupal or Joomla. In fact, in my opinion the user experience is so good within CMS Made Simple, I think it should be used as a blue print for the user experience of other CMS applications such as TeamSite. Bigger doesn’t always translate into better.
So, in regards to content, it is not just about “garbage in, garbage out”. It is about the delivery of content that affects quality. Ultimately, a content management system should be designed to empower writers and editors to do content creation and maintenance themselves. I’d like to see it taken a step further: Empower designers, information architects, and site owners with the ability to make the CMS work for them.