Content Management Systems Matter More than Website Design
Yes, I said it. And more importantly, I believe it. People are coming to your Website for content. Not for an experience, not to see some mind blowing visuals, not to shed a tear at the sheer beauty – they are coming to hear what you have to say. How you say something is very important, and design has a ton to do with that. But if your content is stale, uninspired or lack luster, no amount of award winning web design will provide the remedy. A good content management system (CMS) is the difference between life and death for your Website. Even if you have great words of wisdom, poetic lines of insight, paragraphs of genius to share with your readers – if you don’t have a good CMS, your words may never see the backlit displays they are crying out for.
In many ways, a Website is simply a tool for delivering information, like a book or a television commercial. Of course, the packaging is important, but more and more, with online content, users simply want to get to the content. Great design goes hand in hand with great usability, great navigation, great search engine optimization, great simplicity. And if the CMS is a clunky mess that is a pain to use, chances are you will avoid those updates, feel stressed at the thought of adding content, and even feel bad assigning those tasks to someone else on your team. Content, once conceived, should be easy to add to a Website. The content creator’s biggest challenge should be in coming up with the messages, not inputting them into the system.
I have seen many clients skimp on content creation and spend their budget on enterprises level content management systems that can literally communicate with satellites. I have also seen clients work tirelessly on crafting compelling and important content, only to have it sit in draft form while some developer in a far off location is tracked down to fix a bug in some clunky free solution implemented by the local webpage shop. Neither of these situations are recommended, nor will they bear any fruit. In fact, what you need before you need anything else, is the CMS.
Content will change, evolve, get better, become more fine tuned. As it does, you need a system for getting this new content onto your site. You need a CMS that will make you feel empowered to grow your content, confident that your team can keep fresh and relevant content on your site, relaxed knowing the CMS is doing all it can to ensure your content is found by search engines. Additionally, your CMS should allow your content to do more than simply be seen and read. It should optimize it for you, training you to create SEO friendly headlines and titles, checking for broken links, ensuring outside sites open in new windows, assisting with image size requirements. The CMS should take all the headaches of updating a Website away, so you can focus on what you have to say.
If your CMS is causing headaches, preventing your team from making updates, requiring you to spend more time thinking about how to work the CMS than what your new Website content is going to be, I dare say you’ve chosen badly, or gotten stuck with a poor solution.
Here are things to look for and think about when deciding what CMS is best for your business.
- Do you have a full time person or team who will be assigned to maintaining and operating the CMS? If yes – then you want to ensure the technology employed by the CMS matches the skill sets of the team you have in place. If no, make sure you don’t purchase a CMS that requires IT professionals to use it.
- What other business are using the CMS? Talk to them, find out how happy they are.
- How SEO friendly is the CMS? Does it use semantic markup and things like <H1> tags to help Google index the content? You can usually tell by “viewing source” on any page that is generated by the CMS. (If you see <table> or <tr> tags instead of <H1> or <H2> tags, the CMS is outdated and generating problematic code.)
- Can someone use the CMS without taking a training course? If not, how much training do they need and how often will they need refreshers?
- How big is the user manual? If the manual is over 100 pages, perhaps there is more going on than you need?
- Does the company that created the CMS still own it? My point is, are you buying a system from a company that isn’t really able to support it? Do your research, your most powerful tool is Google.
Once you decide upon a CMS, make sure your team stays involved. Empower them to take control of their content, the more they care the more the content will connect to your prospective audiences.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow, so well written and so true. And yet, I have now worked for two large companies where CMS is (was), at best, clunky and difficult to use. I won’t go into specifics, but I’ve seen one implementation that involves multiple spreadsheets and a lot of manual copying-and-pasting…yikes!
Thanks for the comment, and you do bring up the next issue which is – what are the good CMS solutions out there? Feel free to name names, we want to know the bad ones, the good ones, and the in-betweens. Do share!
As a corollary to your CMS thesis, I submit that careful planning and well-thought-out internal and external information architectures are far more important than “design.” It’s also a pet peeve of mine when people confuse the concepts of design and decoration. Design exists on multiple levels: I can use a CMS as powerful as Drupal or rig one using WordPress’ custom post types features, but if either tool is used with little planning, it’ll reach a critical mass in the future where editing and managing content would be very difficult.
IA is definitely a critical part of a process, and can actually change the way businesses or organizations run internal processes (for the better hopefully). The foundation of the project must be stable and well thought out – I always use the “house” metaphor to help clients out. I tell them if we decide to build a 3 bedroom 2 story house today, it will be almost impossible to change it to a 2 bedroom rancher down the road (unless they want to tear it down and start over). And I agree, decoration is often confused with design.
Tracey, I think that most of the time the CMS is only as good as the developer setting it up and the specs given to them. You can do some crazy things in a CMS that either make it too complicated for the end user or so completely un-scalable that it will never work for the long run. It’s a very fine line to walk.
One of the really cool things that lured me into following you and Fastspot was the fact that you guys have your own CMS. That obviously takes a lot of time to manage but done right could be SO rewarding for your customers. You should write more about how you guys utilize that to your advantage (or disadvantage, as I’m sure it has its pitfalls!) — I’d be very interested in learning more.
From my experience:
Good CMS = Drupal, Expression Engine
OK as a CMS = Wordpress
Bad CMS = DotNetNuke and Ektron
Hey Jason,
Thanks for the comments. I agree completely, a CMS left in the wrong hands can be a disaster. I am actually shocked at how little time and energy is spent on selecting a CMS (client side) and then making sure it works well for the people who need to use it. Over complication seems to be the primary culprit in most CMS solutions out there (Ektron, Ingeniux, SiteCore), but plenty of people sing their praises – so what do I know! Or perhaps they simply don’t know that a better option exists?
As for good ones, I try not to make this a shameless plug for our CMS BigTree because I do think there are other good ones out there. Expression Engine seems to be a great option if you have a team that knows how to make it sing, and same goes for Word Press on a smaller scale.
Since I do most of the “content” management for Fastspot (the website, this blog, twitter) and I am a creative person, I just know how important a useful interface is. The CMS backend needs to be easy as well as empowering, and not intimidate or overwhelm users. Those huge enterprise systems seem more focused on technical options created from a programmer’s perspective, vs. considering their audience and what kind of experience they were providing the user. I guess I could re-title this post, “The Design of Your CMS is More Important than Your Website Design”
I will do a follow up post on why we developed BigTree, the pros (and cons) it provides to our clients, and where we see the industry headed down the line! Keep an eye out.
Cheers!
Tracey,
I don’t know that I would word it the same way, but I agree in principle. I believe that the single most destructive force in a website design can be planning your content and design “around” a CMS. During the critical thinking that occurs while planning the Information Architecture, Content Strategy and Design if you are stopping at every juncture and having to ask each other “but what can we accomplish with our CMS?” than you are set up for failure.
I think the halmark of a good CMS is one that is transparent to the planning process but after construction can empower your clients to edit, maintain and grow the final product of your teams hard work and imagination.