I wrote this a few years ago for a friend asking about content management systems (CMS) and found it while helping another friend recently. For his needs I suggested http://www.joomla.org/ and http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/ instead. For this repost, I’ve updated it slightly to reflect the experience I’ve gained in the interim and to address a more generic audience.
Subject: Some considerations for evaluating a CMS and your needs
Hey there, just to follow up our phone call …
We’ve been kicking around CMS talk too, here, and here’s a few thoughts that might be useful to keep in mind when you guys are figuring out what to get and what you need.
You already know what you have; from there figure out what works, what doesn’t, what you’d like to have. Define your goals and needs. List them out, and rank them in order of importance to each group of users and customers you have – internal and external.
Generally your goals and needs might dovetail into a list that meets your current needs and expands your offerings, while leaving room for more growth later. Maybe you’re looking to both redesign the site and allow a greater range of people to add content. You want your team and contributors to have varying levels of responsibility for the management of that content – without opening the floodgates to everyone editing the site, and overwhelming those responsible for managing the content.
One thing that can aid in defining your goals is figuring out who your customers are. Create user profiles, layering them pyramid-style. The larger the group, the smaller the ability. The smaller the group, the larger the permissions and responsibility. Create a balance of roles to keep things moving without bottle necking content approval or locking out the ability to make swift updates or pull content as needed.
At the bottom of the pyramid are your most simple users. They use the site, read things, take polls, make suggestions. Potentially, they participate in message boards if needed.
The next level is for content contributors. They write more expansive and permanent content, such as blogs, help notes or content. Their contributions follow certain coding guidelines, like simple HTML only, to fit into defined templates. Slightly senior contributors might take responsibility for approving content of others at this level. Specialized contributors might bear the sole responsibility of some sections, such as calendars or event marketing.
The next level up includes content managers, sometimes called content strategists. They may have several roles: periodically or methodically approving high-visibility content and recommending senior content contributors. Coordinating content such as ongoing articles in a series, suggesting and designing new links, new sections, and more. Spot-checking content for “legality” in the framework of the website, both in code and content.
On this same level or even a little higher would be site designers who actually implement the look and feel of the pages. They add in new pages and sections, linking as appropriate on the site. There would be a couple folks for this – they’d start by working with a sampling of the broader group to design the initial site, later making this vision a reality.
We’re looking more at internal CMS systems at this point – to hold our data and then pull it out when needed. You all seem to be looking for a website manager and content manager. The one we discussed on the phone, Ektron CMS400.NET, at first glance may do what your group is looking to do. This will be easier for you to evaluate once you’ve broken down your customers (internal and external) as above, with defined roles and responsibilities.
There are many more systems out there that do the same kind of content and web management, but the further you refine what your requirements are, the easier it will be to map to individual software offerings.
Questions to ask the vendors, once you have your list of people and content requirements (for example, handling pod casts, setting different levels of editing ability, converting .doc files to HTML – whatever).
1. Can your product do [list of important items]?
2. Out of the box?
3. If [some items] are custom, how long to take to get it in place?
4. What kind of support is available or required for customizations?
5. Who hosts the software?
6. What is the policy on modifications?
Luckily, the field of smaller, scalable content management has matured over the past few years. The basic needs your group appears to have should be generally met out of the box by any of the several mature CMS packages out there.
Good luck, and let me know if you want to chat some more about defining your group’s requirements.
The slightly casual tone is intentional, intended for forwarding up the chain of command from someone who has been there and is doing (or has done) that. The original requester wanted an easily digestible overview of what a CMS could do for them, and what they needed to do to help themselves find a software solution.
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