Will a WCMS help you manage your content? By Evil Erin.

I have worked with web content management systems (WCMS) for a long time now. To me they are an essential tool for any large organisation wanting to manage lots of websites and content. I have always been surprised by the number of web professionals I have met who either don’t understand what a WCMS is for or cannot see any benefit to using one.

So I thought it might be useful to answer the following questions…

What is a WCMS?

It does exactly what it says on the tin. The purpose of a WCMS is to manage and share content across multiple websites. It’s that simple. A WCMS allows web editors to publish content across multiple sites,  control that content, and control editorial access to it.

So what is it good at then?

• Controlling editorial access – A WCMS is great for controlling access to particular sites, access to part of a particular site, or access to particular types of content. You only want your press office to create press releases? No problemo.
• Controlling publishing – You don’t want your press officer to publish a press release before the Press Office manager has approved it? Easy, WCMS systems use workflow to manage user roles.
• Sharing content – You want to add the same web page to 230 websites? Not a problem with a WCMS.
• Presentation Control – WCMS’s allow you to control how content is used and where it can be displayed with page templates. For example, Press releases can only appear on a newsroom template.
• No techie skills required – A WCMS allows web editors to create content without any web technical expertise whatsoever. HTML? Never heard of it guv’nor.
• Quickly create new sites – Give me the site name, hit a button and ta-da! New site created.
• Improved performance – Most WCMS systems allow techie types to easily optimise performance across your web platform.
• Reusing content – Want an image of a car? The chances are there is already one loaded into the WCMS, just search the repository for the car image rather than having to find a new image.
• Enforcing standards – More control! Your sites need to be W3C AA compliant? Easy, just ensure your WCMS templates and stylesheets comply and all your sites will comply.
• Previewing content – Want to see your content in-context before the rest of the world can see it? Just preview your content before it is published to the rest of the world.

It sounds great, what’s the catch?

• Flexibility – A press release can only be displayed on a newsroom, remember? Want a press release on the homepage? That’ll be an update to the page template then. If you need lots of  quick tweeks to design and functionality a WCMS will really slow this down.
• Frustrating for editors – If your editors are used to editing HTML directly using dreamweaver they will find a WCMS very frustrating because of the limitations it places on them. They cannot edit HTML like they used to.
• It takes time to implement – Implementing a WCMS in a large organisation can be a very time consuming business.
• Slows progress – The internet is a very fast moving environment these days. New technology and innovations arrive all the time. A WCMS does not lend itself well to keeping pace with these new developments.
• Can be slow to add content – Most WCMS systems treat every web page element as a separate bit of content. Your page contains 5 images and 10 links? You had better create 5 image content types and 5 links in the WCMS then!
• Training – Got 200 editors across the globe? Someone will rack up the airmiles to train them. That’ll cost you!
• Lose the WCMS, lose all your sites! – If the WCMS fails or the database behind it fails you could potentially lose all your sites.
• Is it overkill? – If you only have 5 small sites and 10 HTML editors there is little point implementing a WCMS. A WCMS works best when you have many sites and editors and lots of content.
• Not great for SEO – Generally WCMS systems are not great at search engine optimisation.
• Cost – I am sure I have mentioned cost before?! Ouch, they can cost a lot!

Have I missed anything? Let me know!

You may have noticed that I used the word “control” several times in the “good at” area. That word really sums up what a WCMS offers organisations.  Editorial, presentation and publishing control of web content. Combine that with the lack of technical expertise required and the ability to easily share and reuse content across many sites and you have a powerful tool that will be invaluable to many large organisation.

If however, your company requires maximum flexibility and costs are an issue, think long and hard before investing in a WCMS.