July 2001

Making the Move to a Content Management System

Content may be king, but managing the monarch is an increasingly complex task. John Kovacevich, Tendo editorial director, has five tips for simplifying the process.

By John Kovacevich

A few years ago, it all seemed so simple.

When you wanted to add a new product or a press release to your company website, somebody created the new page, you updated a few links, and bingo, your information was up-to-date.

But that was several million Web pages ago. Now your manual system is creating a bottleneck. Updating each page individually requires time and technical resources—even more so as the site grows larger and increasingly complex.

If this is the case, you are probably ready—if not desperate—for a content management system (CMS) to help automate the creation and maintenance of your website.

"In five years, everybody will have a CMS," says Jay MacIntosh, former cofounder of Promptu, a company that provided Web-hosted sales, marketing, and communications applications. "Not only do they reduce production costs, they give communicators the tools they need to get their message out."

In a January 2001 report by Forrester Research, "Managing Content Hypergrowth," analysts interviewed 53 executives who supervise content for business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) sites ranging in size from several thousand to many millions of pages. All of them had some kind of CMS: Thirty used software from outside vendors, while 23 had homegrown solutions. But 43 percent of the companies with in-house solutions said they were considering purchasing an outside system—primarily because they'd outgrown the ones they'd built.

Whether you're a global enterprise or a small business, here are five fundamentals to remember.

Assemble the right team

Unless you want to go through this process every couple of years (and, believe me, you don't), make sure you have all the right people at the table when you select a content management system. The decisions you make will have long-lasting implications.

Your team should involve in-house IT and Web infrastructure people, and it should also include stakeholders from throughout the organization: marketing, corporate communications, human resources, international partners——anybody who is creating content for your company's target audience.

It's important to understand that a CMS is more than just new software; it represents a culture shift for your organization. By democratizing the Web publishing process, you are fundamentally changing the way people do their work. Building consensus among key constituents is critical.

Set the right goal

What are you trying to achieve? "Develop a streamlined process to deliver valuable content to our target audience" is a very different goal from "Automate the website." It's important to clearly define the company-wide goal that's driving a move to a CMS, since the process may spark conflict.

That's right: conflict. After all, you're asking different parts of your organization—most of which have had free rein over their parts of the site—to be part of a larger strategy. That may mean sacrificing some of the autonomy and control they have previously enjoyed. An art director may have less flexibility in page designs. An editor may need to trim copy for the new environment. Keep in mind that compromise is an easier pill to swallow when it's related to a shared objective.

Put the users first

One of the first tasks in moving to a CMS is also the most difficult—defining the content hierarchy. In order for the CMS to sort and display your information (think of it as a big electronic mail room), each piece of content must be "tagged" or categorized correctly.

To tag content, you must decide how you want it to be organized—not just based on your company's internal nomenclature, but using the language of your target audience. For example, a customer may search for a new vacuum cleaner using "cleaning tools" rather than the "house maintenance" category that appears on your company organizational chart. Homing in on what users want and how they will use the system is an important early step in the success of a content management system.

CMS is the medium, not the message

Repeat after me: A content management system is a delivery system, not a content strategy.

Some executives may see content management systems as a way to cut personnel costs. It's true that a good CMS will save you on coding time; since page creation is template-based, HTML coders are not needed to create every new page.

But somebody still needs to decide what content should be developed and then create, fact-check, copy edit, and load it into the system.

Here's something else to keep in mind: garbage in, garbage out. Just because a CMS makes it easier to publish your company's content, that doesn't necessarily mean that you want to put everything on your Web site. Be sure to allocate sufficient time to review existing content before pushing it all through the CMS.

Start small, go fast

You don't have to remake your entire website in one fell swoop. In fact, companies that try to solve all of their content challenges at once can get bogged down.

MacIntosh recommends that companies "start small and go fast." Take a smaller section of content—a particular program or division—and implement a CMS. "By going fast and demonstrating the system is a success," MacIntosh says, "you can learn important lessons and build momentum."

About the author:

Since leading the project team to transform the 3,000-page Cisco iQ website into an automated, CMS-driven site, Tendo editorial director John Kovacevich has been dreaming of one day having a content management system of his very own.