Content management systems

Our experience is that when our clients weigh up their CMS, they are looking for:

• Cost effectiveness
• Streamlined work flows
• Responsiveness to business requirements
• Interactivity
• Search engine optimisation

Feel free to ask us for advice, or to find out more about RockSolid CMS. We’ll help you decide what CMS is right for you – whether it’s one of our products, or something else on the market.

Is your CMS cost effective?

A good CMS can more than pay for itself over the life of your website. Running costs are just as important as the upfront spend, so ’hidden’ labour costs should be included in this assessment.

• Does your website require niche technical skills for routine tasks, such as uploading content?
• What are the associated administrative costs (including liaising with your technical team)?

A best-of-breed website will be so easy to use that anyone in your organisation can manage content themselves. Look for a CMS that lets you edit content exactly as it will appear on screen (known as a ‘what you see is what you get’ or WYSIWYG editor). The money you save in web administration can be reinvested in IT or marketing projects that will give a better return on your business goals.

Another hidden cost of your CMS is the technology it’s built on. Your CMS should be built on a well-established and widely supported software platform. Supply and demand dictates that developers who use fringe technologies can charge a premium for their services. Fringe technologies will also limit availability of plug-ins if you want to extend your website’s functions, also driving up costs.

At RockSolid, we keep software costs low by building our CMS on the Microsoft .NET platform because it’s used by more developers than any other platform in Australia.

Does your CMS help you manage workflows?

Does it make content approvals easier?

A CMS can save time by automating the approval process. More sophisticated CMSs will automatically generate an email letting content managers know when a page is ready for them to approve. Lower-end CMSs have no project management or workflow functions; they are simple web-publishing tools for uploading content.

Does it give you the level of oversight and accountability you require?

Work-flow enabled CMSs can keep an audit trail and maintain version control for every piece of content on your website. This feature will be particularly useful for:

• organisations needing rigorous oversight of content authoring
• organisations where multiple staff may try to edit content at the same time.

Does it fit the way your organisation works now?

We encourage organisations to run a yearly basic health check on their website and content management systems. For many organisations, a major internal or environmental change is a trigger for reviewing their website and CMS:

• Does your CMS still produce the kind of reporting information your managers require?
• Do your CMSs workflows still reflect your current organisational structure?

A best of breed CMS can adapt to your structure by allowing site administrators to add and remove role-based access.

Is your CMS flexible enough?

Creating a unique online brand needs a CMS that puts you in the driver’s seat when you decide how to present your content.

Is the CMS provider responsive to your requirements?

Off-the-shelf solutions: these will often lock you into standard layouts and navigation structures. The risk is that your website has exactly the same look and feel as your competitors’.

Customised CMS: A good CMS provider will collaborate with you to create content templates, offering tried and tested options, but also customising them for your requirements. The result: a unique online brand that helps you maintain your competitive edge.

But there is also such a thing as too much flexibility. Why pay for features that you don’t need? A responsive CMS provider will give you the degree of control you want, where you want it.

Take two examples from our recent projects. One of our clients had an in-house graphic designer, so we delivered a CMS that gave them precise editing controls. Another of our clients outsourced their graphic design, so we saved them money by delivering a CMS that automatically optimised images for uploading.

Does the CMS have in-built flexibility?

Your CMS should have enough flexibility to evolve as your organisation changes. Does your CMS give you the freedom to:

• Change navigation structures (while preserving links between pages)
• Create as many pages as you want
• Create as many navigation levels as you want
• Move large sections of your site at once
• Control how links are created (as hyperlinked text, or as images)?

Does your CMS help you interact with consumers?

Web 2.0 means looking beyond your website as just a place to put content. Your website can be a vital part of your marketing or engagement strategies:

• A revenue generator through an e-commerce function
• A forum for holding conversations with your audience through social media
• A platform for syndicating content (converting it to pdf, podcasting or RSS feeds)
• A HR tool through an online recruitment function
• A business intelligence tool, tracking trends in consumer’s behaviour through customised reporting.

Which of these functions are in line with your corporate strategy?

Are these functions supported by your current CMS?

Does your website make it easy for customers to find you?

While web advertising will always play a part in some businesses’ marketing strategy, organic searching is pivotal. Consumers typically rely on organic, self-directed browsing when looking for a new service. As businesses vie for pole position online, you will need a search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy to make you stand out in search engines.

Search-engine-friendly web addresses

Your CMS should automatically generate clean web addresses for your content – wherever it is on your site. URLs such as www.yourbusiness/sales have an SEO edge over URLs that are strings of code.

Clean URLs also have a marketing edge: they improve the consumers experience by giving them a clear sense of their location within the site, and are much easier to reference in print .

Letting you define searchable fields.

A good CMS will let you control the visual and non-visual fields that are indexed by search engines. You can hone in on your target market by creating meta-data containing keywords you know consumers are likely to search by.