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Jeff Cram

It’s all about the user experience according to Jeff. He combines deep expertise in web strategy, information architecture, analytics, online marketing and social media to figure out how they all factor into successful content management projects. His day job is Chief Strategy Officer at ISITE Design -- an agency he co-founded in 1997. Jeff resides in Cambridge, MA.

Is WordPress a CMS?

So, here’s a question…is WordPress a CMS?
And be careful how you respond.
The debate hit Twitter tonight triggered by a relatively harmless Tweet from Dirk Shaw:

I’ve been a part of similar discussions on how WordPress can or can’t scale to support larger sites. It wasn’t until another vendor and a CMS evangelist piled on in [...]

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Stop letting people use your CMS

Seth Gottlieb at Content Here is on a roll lately with some great thinking.
His post on The Myth of the Occasional CMS User was timely based on some conversations we’ve been having around the office. There is a lot to unpack in it, and of course anything with Myth in the title catches our attention.
Seth [...]

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Our Department is Different!

If you’ve been through an enterprise CMS rollout, you’re probably familiar with these four simple words.
“Our department is different!”
This is a common and legitimate response from groups used to managing their own websites. They argue that their needs are so specific there is little chance a common template can work.
After all, while the CMS adds [...]

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2010 web strategy survey

As you wrangle those 2010 budgets and plot CMS world domination, it’s a good time to reevaluate your overall web strategy.  How are you prioritizing initiatives? Are budgets increasing? How effective were your 2009 efforts? What are new areas of investment?
We’re putting together our second annual Web Strategy Report in partnership with ISITE Design.
Take part [...]

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Q&A: An interview with Susan Parker from Mass.gov

We were fortunate to catch up with Susan Parker at Gilbane’s 2009 Content Management conference in Boston this week.
Susan is the Director of Mass.gov and is responsible for managing the State of Massachusetts’ online strategy in connecting more than 150 different state agencies, departments and services into a unified online experience. In short, both a [...]

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Be thankful for your CMS

Ok, there are certainly more important things to be thankful for than a piece of technology.
But in the spirit of the holiday it’s nice to recognize all the good things web content management does for you.
Sure, CMS implementations are hard. Documentation may be less than stellar and those pesky WYSIWYG editors can give you anything [...]

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The sweet spot for WCM services

Web content management implementations require a careful blend of skills to succeed. But what should you look for in an external WCM services provider? We see three core disciplines necessary for success — User experience strategy, marketing enablement and enterprise IT.
What’s more, the sweet spot for a good partner lies in the intersection of these [...]

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What can three wise web monkeys teach us about CMS?

I’m in muggy Orlando for a few days to present at Synergy09, Ektron’s world-wide user conference. By good fortune, I sat next to web operations guru Lisa Welchman at lunch, and then caught her keynote on ‘the three wise web monkeys.’
I find myself nodding along to pretty much whatever Lisa says, and today was no [...]

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Is interest in content management declining?

It feels like content management is alive and well, but a quick look at Google Trends indicates that search demand for content management has been on a steady decline over the last five years.
According to Google, search interest for  “content management” is down roughly 75% from five years ago.


A similar trend is apparent for “web content [...]

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Are you shaving the bear?

Reading Seth Godin’s Bear Shaving post yesterday, I couldn’t help but think of the CMS Myth.
As Seth explains, bear shaving is “the effort we take to deal with the symptoms of the problem instead of addressing the case of the problem.”  As in shaving a bear to deal with global warming.
This rings especially [...]

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