Content Managemnet

By: Paul Riat - businessnewsupdate.com

Five or six years ago a web site was a fairly static thing that told about a widget or a company, or welcomed you to the world of the Hamster Dance. Not so today. Web sites connect, inform and sell stuff in potentially the fastest paced market place (virtual that it may be) in the world.

To make the modern Web site "sing" a lot of changes need to be made - often. That's where all those What You See Is What You Get web page editors fall short. They force the people who are updating the site to think of the site as a bunch of pages and not a bunch of content.

That's where a content management system can do the trick.

"If all they're interested in is a straight 'brochure' site, there's no need for a content management system," Scott Granneman of Bryan Consulting told those attending these weeks meeting of the St. Louis Web Developers Organization in Creve Coeur, MO.

CMSs are Web-based tools with features like data input templates, document management, workflow management and presentation templates that let a whole bunch of people get involved in putting content on a web site.

Document management is the ability to manage a variety of files, including text files, pictures, PowerPoint presentations and others.
Revision control lets users track changes in the updated content.
Workflow management involves setting different responsibilities and different levels of control over the system for different people.
Presentation templates are different ways of displaying the content to give the site, or a part of the site, a whole new look - without having to redo the whole thing.

One of the clues that a CMS is needed is that the web site gets created, but is not updated.

"Clients find it difficult to update the web site," Granneman said. "They're technologically unable to update it and then updating is hamstrung by bottlenecks."

When only one or two people are in charge of the content going up on a site, but several people are creating that content, there's a bottleneck. People give content to the designated updater, who gets overwhelmed or simply puts it off.

Companies that save up all revisions and hand them off to some hired-gun web developer for a quarterly update runs into the same problem - it's just no longer "in house."

With a content management system a site designer sets up the actual look and feel of the site, but the people who generate the content get to put it up on the site themselves. Most CMSs allow for a hierarchy of users. Some people get to post content to the site, others submit content for revision and approval. The thing is, a different "editor" can be established for different parts of the site.

Granneman says that a lot of executives get really excited when the functionality of a CMS is explained to them, but not a lot of mid-sized companies have them yet.

"The problem is that most companies don't know what a content management system is," said Granneman. "And most web designers don't either."

One of the big reasons for that is that until the last year or two, content management systems cost so much money that only the biggest companies could afford them. One of the early leaders in this type of software was Vignette, and one of their systems could run a couple of hundred thousand dollars.

Now there are many systems that, while perhaps not as all encompassing as Vignette, cost just a few hundred dollars a year. One that he likes a lot, Manila, goes for $899 a year.

Websites:
www.hamsterdance.com
www.bryanconsulting.com
www.vignette.com
manila.userland.com

Paul Riat covers tech and biotech business news in and around Missouri for Business News Update.

E-mail him with story ideas or comments.