November 2007 - Posts

• WYSIWYG Overload

  I had the privilege of presenting alongside Danny Young at the Gilbane CMS show here in Boston this week. Danny is the Manager of e-Business Development for ESAB Holdings. One nugget from his talk was a recommendation on how to increase end user adoption on CMS implementations. We've all seen the embedded WYSIWYG editors grow in size and features over the years as vendors look to provide more and more functionality. These tools can have dozens of options each with their own icon. His advice? Start by turning OFF all the options. Then, selectively turn them back on based on what your end users actually need. Providing less options makes it easier on your content editors, reduces training time and helps preserve the design integrity of your site. Great idea Danny. Posted Nov 29 2007, 12:50 PM by Jeff with 3 comment(s) Filed under: Gilbane, Usability

• Web 2.0 Jumps the Shark

  Two years after everyone (at least everyone in the Web world) began talking about “Web 2.0,” this most overused of terms may have finally, mercifully, worn itself out this week, at least as far as it’s used in the content management community.     At the Content Management Professionals (CM Pros) summit in Boston on Monday, no fewer than six sessions had “Web 2.0” in their titles (“Next Generation of Web Content Management with a Dash of Web 2.0”) and the common themes of wikis, blogs, and social media were peppered through most of the other sessions. There was even a keynote on “Internet 3.0.”   And at the Gilbane Conference on Tuesday and Wednesday (continuing today), the Web 2.0 buzzword was omnipresent; you could hear it being discussed in conference sessions, around lunch tables, and in hallway conversations. Nearly each of the 70+ vendors have some variation on the theme to discuss with you.   The ironic part: two years after the seminal article by publisher Tim O’Reilly in which he loosely described Web 2.0 as a raft of new applications, sites and philosophies (blogs, Wikipedia, Flickr, tagging), the definition has become looser still. About the only thing people agree on is that it represents better practices on the web -- better tools and ideas for using the web to communicate, interact and build useful applications.   Not to be denied, “Enterprise 2.0” is now capturing the imaginations of the masses. What is it? Take all that stuff that was in Web 2.0 in consumer-focused things like Flickr photo sharing and Facebook. Now apply it to business. It’s anyone’s guess how long that term will stick around.     Posted Nov 29 2007, 12:20 PM by David with no comments

• Pragmatic CMS Advice to Build On

  On the eve of the CM Pros Summit and the Gilbane Conference on Content Management (both in Boston this week) here are a few bits of foundational advice from The CMS Myth. If you find yourself right now within 100 miles of a web CMS implementation project, consider this a quick reality check for you and your team.  “Content management” is a business process and a discipline; CMS is a software tool. You need both. But don’t equate one with the other.  If you haven’t established a clear and coherent web strategy, get one. If you don’t have a strategy, don’t get a CMS. A CMS is not a web strategy. A CMS doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s a central part of a diverse website ecosystem. It’s frequently the glue that holds together website/marketing/analytics/other software and applications (e.g. ExactTarget, Google Analytics, CRM systems, etc.) So, think beyond the CMS. Plan ahead and document your plans for your web CMS. And when you’re done, plan some more. There’s no such thing as too much planning before you tackle a CMS project.   All vendors say their CMS is easy to use. If you buy that, then also be prepared to invest in user training and mentoring – and potentially lots of it. You’ve probably spent way too many hours (months?) researching CMS features, price, and other criteria. Sick of sifting through RFP responses and feature matrix comparisons? Turn instead to trusted market observers (e.g. CMSWatch, Forrester, Gartner, Gilbane) who’ve done the heavy lifting and can deliver a valid short list of CMS systems that would meet your needs.    Posted Nov 26 2007, 02:42 AM by David with 3 comment(s) Filed under: Gilbane, CM Pros, ecosystem, CMS selection, training, strategic planning, RFP

• Gilbane CMS Conference Invades Boston

  An annual high note for CMS practitioners occurs this week when the Gilbane Conference on Content Management hits Boston, from Tuesday through Thursday. The CMS Myth will be there in serious myth-busting (read: best practices advocacy) mode.   Catch us under The CMS Myth banner or our alter-ego, ISITE Design, at one of these sessions:   Our 3-hour Gilbane Tutorial [track D] covering Web CMS Implementation Best Practices, Tuesday morning, 9-12. The session features The CMS Myth + real-world users from Siemens, Judson University, and ESAB North America providing lessons from the trenches. MythBuster Jeff Cram speaking on the Best Practices for Improving Online Customer Experience panel, Tuesday at 3 Visit The CMS Myth kiosk at the Gilbane Expo on Wednesday and Thursday. Bonus appearance: If you’re at the CM Pros Summit on Monday the 26th, we’ll be in and out of sessions all day, and we’ll also be presenting on ‘Web 2.0 in the Enterprise’ with client Siemens at 2:30. A couple of additional points of interest: We’ll also attempt to blog from the conference …. WiFi willing. Talk about a fragmented vendor landscape: There are at least 70 CMS and ‘related’ vendors (translation/localization; enterprise search) exhibiting at Gilbane...We'll be on the lookout for blog-worthy vendor superlatives to post here.   Posted Nov 26 2007, 02:15 AM by David with no comments Filed under: Speaking, Gilbane, Boston, CM Pros, Presenting

• Is Your Content Really King?

  So I am a technology guy and as the 'technology guy' it is somewhat out of character for me to get up on a soapbox about content  So what horrific crime has been committed against content that a self professed geek would care to blog to the world about it?  Neglect. Yes you heard me right, neglect. You buy a CMS to manage the content, invest in SEO to drive traffic to content and spend money on search technology to help people find your content.  In our new world of web 2.0 you are now syndicating content, and using technology like RSS to distribute this content. But the ugly truth is that more often than not I am building empty sites only to have companies carelessly cut and paste their old content into the 'new' site. There is often little regard to the quality or relevance of their content. We do talk about content early and often with our clients, but it's often met with a series of excuses that leads to content neglect: "Don't worry about it, we will take care of the content internally" "Let's just get the site built first" "We don't have the time now, we will fix it later" "We'll just go with what you have in the information architecture as placeholder content" "Our content is fine" So how do you stop content neglect?  It starts with understanding the value it has to your website, user experience and overall business. It should be one the first things you start working on once you have agreed to a site structure. Content development needs dedicated resources internally and the process should run parallel to the entire development project.  Don't think it will be easy. It is one of the hardest and most time consuming parts of any CMS implementation and requires continued attention to get it right. But it is the reason you got a CMS in the first place, right? Otherwise you would have just bought a "Management System." Posted Nov 04 2007, 03:36 PM by George with no comments Filed under: Content, Implementation, Planning