Why your Website Needs a Content Management System...

The potential advantages of an online market has created a drive for small businesses to create an online presence. Many, however, simply have a website designed, and stop there, without realising the true potential and maximising the real value their site has to offer. If you have a website, you either have a content management system at the heart of it, or you have a fairly static site. If you don`t yet have a content management system driving your site, you may wonder why you need it.

This article will help clarify a few reasons why a content management core is almost essential for keeping your online investment paying for itself on an ongoing basis.

1) Non-technical people can update content

We all like to think of ourselves as super-capable people, but the reality is that there are very few people who are all round brilliant programmers, designers and content creators. In fact most people are none-of-the-above. Some try, but most fall short in at least one or two areas compared to a professional who only focuses on one of these competencies.

What this means is that your website designer or programmer is probably not your best marketing person, and therefore not the best person to maintain your website`s contents. A content management system allows anyone who can use a word processor and has some basic computer literacy, to update their website, as often as they want.

2) It costs less

This may sound strange when you consider that it will always cost more to have a content management system built into your website. Of course the cost benefit isn`t the up-front development cost, its value is in not having to pay a developer to manually make changes to the site, which of course is very costly, and time consuming.

3) Separation of content from code

Let`s say you design a great site, populate it with three years of material, by which time the technology used to build the site is outdated. If your content is interwoven with the site itself you`ll be throwing out the baby with the bathwater if you upgrade your website. A good content management system will allow you to completely overhaul the presentation and application logic of your site, while maintaining your content in perfect separation from the mechanics of the rest of the site.

4) Uniformity of design

When you have a content management system built for you, every page it displays is always done the exact same way. In fact, in many cases, you are simply seeing the exact same “page” every time you view it, the system just displays different content in it according to your requests. This creates a consistent presentation of your content across your site. There`s nothing worse for a site visitor to have to do than have to figure out where everything is for every page they visit. A confusing and disorientating site will seldom get repeat visitors.

5) Upgradeability and maintainability

Because a well-developed content management system is designed to play nicely with the rest of the site, you can upgrade the content management system, or make changes to it, without affecting the rest of the site. In fact, as long as the API (application programming interface, or protocol for communication with the site) remains the same, you can completely replace your content management system with a new one.

6) Currency of content

This is probably your best benefit. By removing the technical and process barriers to creating new content, you are limited only by your desire to create content, and your motivation to do so. It should be no more or less difficult than opening a Word or OpenOffice document and getting started, just with this solution, the world gets to see your work once you have previewed and published it.

In short, if you don`t have a content management solution in place for your business website at the moment, you effectively have an online marketing brochure, possibly with some application functionality. That may be sufficient for your purposes, but a good CMS will make a huge difference to the relevance and value of your site to your customers and potential customers.

Does Your Web Site Have a Content Management Probl...

At the end of the 90s, research forecasts of online retail sales were aiming for a modest $15 billion by the end of 2003. Compare that with recent figures from Forrester Research indicating that online retail sales in the US alone reached $175 billion in 2007, up 21% from $144.6 billion in 2006. And what’s more, despite a predicted slowdown as the industry matures, it will still add on approximately $30 billion in revenue every year for the next five years.

Unfortunately, online marketing doesn’t come in a pre-packaged kit with friendly do-it-yourself instructions. There is only one really important rule for online marketing: the best content that’s most accessible earns the most, which is why a content management problem is one of the most serious obstacles to a revenue-generating online presence.

What a good Web site can do for your business

The business benefits of a good corporate or sales Web site are pretty much old hat now. But considering how many organizations ignore these basic principles, it would do well to go over them again:

Reach more people

It’s the one advantage that has made the Internet the best thing since sliced bread: time and space become irrelevant. Thus, your Web site is able to reach out to many more customers than your brick-and-mortar store ever could. This becomes particularly relevant when you consider that 210 million Americans alone went online in 2007, and by 2012, over 1.2 billion people are slated to go online.

The online-offline connection

The returns from an online presence shouldn’t always be measured only in terms of online sales. As one study discovered, 51 % of customers surveyed researched products online before buying them offline. Thus, the study pegs the dollar value of offline sales influenced by online research to rise from $400 billion to $1 trillion in the next five years.

Lead generation and branding

Two key measures of an effective Web site is how many leads it generates and how much it helps build a brand image. Consider the results of a survey by Forrester Research: 42.1% of respondents felt that online marketing was an important marketing tactic for generating quality leads, next only to in-person events, trade magazines and public relations. For online branding too, the tally for online marketing stood at a strong 40%. 

Cost effective advertising

Online advertising and marketing spending is expected to undergo a compounded annual growth of 27% over the next four years, reaching $61 billion by 2012. An idea of why this is happening comes from a study by the Target Corporation which found that in terms of ROI, internet advertising performed two-and-a-half times better than magazines and 15 times better than television.

So, does your Web site have a content management problem?


Although most organizations understand the fundamentals of content production, there are a number of problems that occur due primarily to bad content management. To discover if you have a content management problem, just answer the following questions about your company’s Web site:

Do customers have trouble finding what they need?
Is a lot of the information they find outdated or wrong?
Is content overwritten or erased accidentally and are previous versions unavailable?
Is navigation changing from page to page?
Does the homepage feel out of place on the site?
Is there difficulty ensuring that content is authored and audited by the right people?
Are the right people not able to put up content because of access control issues?
Is content not being updated quickly enough?
Are there difficulties in publishing, changing the format of or removing content from the site?
Does all the content exist in separate silos?
Are there difficulties in tailoring content towards specific customers?

If you answered “yes” to all or most or even some of these questions, then there is definitely a need for a quality content management solution.

What your CMS can do

What a CMS solution primarily does for your organization is to introduce a certain amount of automation and workflow structure into the content creation and publishing process, thus removing all the errors that come from ad-hoc publishing routines that occur in a plain-HTML process:

Distribute content creation

The primary advantage of a CMS system is that it puts content creation in the hands of the subject matter experts, who are usually non-technical business users. This means that it is much easier to put the content creation responsibility in the hands of a wider pool of employees, without requiring a technical team to constantly be on hand to make changes or updates. This also ensures that all content is timely and up-to-date.

Ensure content and brand consistency

Putting content creation in the hands of a larger pool of contributors also requires greater vigilance about content and brand consistency. Quality CMS solutions ensure that all common parts of any message such as the information about products, services, company profile, logos, and so on are single-sourced; thus ensuring that every message going out is properly representative of the organization.

Improve usability

An important contribution of a quality CMS solution is the improvements on information architecture it can provide. This contributes directly to the quality of user experience on a Web site as well as decreasing the time required for information retrieval.

Prevent liability

The back end of content management not only involves ensuring that content is authored by the right people but also that it passes through the right approval channels and is auditable. In Web environments working on HTML, the lack of expertise makes the review and approval process more haphazard and cumbersome. A CMS, on the other hand, brings some of the rigor that is commonly associated with print publication, ensuring that every piece of content passes through all the correct approval channels. Also since Web content is so ephemeral, every version of any published content must be captured in order to minimize liability of the organization. Content management systems provide just such a trail.

Ensure compliance

One of the most difficult aspects of the current information explosion is the tightrope walk between keeping up with competition while ensuring regulatory or other compliance. Here a CMS helps by ensuring that all updates and deletions of content are consistent across the Web site, thus preventing liability from stray pieces of content.

The business benefits


There are a number of significant business advantages from the quality and workflow improvements delivered by an efficient CMS system:

A CMS helps marketers respond effectively to new marketing challenges by allowing them access to Web resources without being at the mercy of over-stressed technical staff.
A CMS ensures more efficient scaling of the technical team by putting publishing in non-technical hands and freeing up IT for important technical tasks like building applications.
It ensures quality, accuracy, value and timeliness of content by ensuring that subject matter experts are free to publish content without the unnecessary mediation of technical personnel. And this is above the cost advantages gained by not needing technical assistance for every small modification.
It improves usability and information retrieval times and therefore contributes to user satisfaction, especially in an age of more ruthless and less patient online user behavior.
The organization’s branding is also more effectively controlled without requiring significant costs to maintain the structure and consistency of design and branding.
A content management system fosters greater knowledge innovation by freeing up content from traditional, static silos and allowing greater interaction between an organization and its customers.
Conclusion


Having an online presence is not enough if that presence does not in anyway contribute to increasing a company’s revenue. The key to ensuring an effective online presence is strong content, which in today’s age of ever-changing fluidity of information is an extremely difficult task. Organizations would therefore do well to invest in a quality content management system that will bring more rigor and flexibility to the process of content authoring.

Why do you need a content management system ( CMS ...

Do you have a website? How often are you updating it? If the answer to that question is “a long time ago” or something similar, you are bound to have an out of date website. Not only will customers notice this and leave your site quickly, your overall search engine rankings may also go down as Google and other search engines will spider your site less regularly and rank it lower.

What is the key to having an updated website?

Updating a website can be a lot of effort. You may have to contact your web designer, email the changes, potentially correct the changes and then pay for them! Or you may need to ask your in house web master. If it is difficult, expensive or time-consuming to update your website, you will not do it and your website will be less effective. So what are the factors to keep in mind when you are trying to find a content management solution?

* It needs to be easy

This is essential. If it’s all too hard and complicated you will never do it. This means that you will need a solution that is very easy to learn and implement.

* It needs to be low cost

If you have to pay every time you want to update your website or ask someone else you will think twice about doing it. You may catch yourself thinking: “Is this update really necessary?” Is it worth spending the money on this?”. Only free updates will ensure that you will update the site whenever you feel a need or have some interesting information to share.

* It needs to look professional

The last thing you want to do is downgrade your professional website with your updates. It is important that the website keeps its professional look and feel even if you are updating it. Therefore the system needs to be of a certain quality with styles already applied so that all you need to do is type in the text and add images.

* It needs to be search engine friendly

This is a very important point as for many business as high search engine positions are critical to your business success. So you will need to make sure that the content management system you choose for your website is easy to optimise for search engines with unique page titles and description and keywords tags.

Your options

You will need to get a website that is easy to update with the use of a content management system ( CMS ). Here are some of the possibilities:

The best option is to have an in built content management system. This lets you easily update your website within a browser so you can update your website at any time and at any place. You can have several user accounts so various people from your company can update certain parts of the website. The best content management systems also come with a blog. It is a good practice to put headlines or short summaries of your blog on the front page so that your homepage will be frequently updated. This lets Google and other search engines know that there is frequent updated content and that your site is current and active and therefore needs to rank higher in search engines. A CMS is usually the easiest the use of the options mentioned here. Make sure you use an SEO friendly CMS though. Another option is to build your website around a blog application like Wordpress. Although Wordpress was initially created as blog software it is increasingly used as a CMS and can be very effective for business websites. Using Wordpress takes a little more training and can be slightly less flexible than a good in built CMS. You can use software like Adobe Contribute to update a static site. Although relatively easy to use, it has a few disadvantages as it can be tricky to create and link to new pages. Another disadvantage is that you would not be able to edit your site on every computer.

Good luck with your website and make sure you keep it up to date!

Content Management System: New Era of Technology...

Content Management systems have reached the stage of being a commodity that is highly in demand. The proof is in the number of competing products that are on the market today and the low prices that these high-end content management systems are currently being offered at.

Then also there is a very good demand for content management system. There are a number of reasons for it. But the main reason for good demand is more consumers are becoming publishers and the growing number of Web users turned online entrepreneurs who are seeking ways to managing their content output. With so much content being published every day and at such an accelerated speed, the demand for content management systems continue to grow.

These consumers usually don’t have the budget or don’t want to spend a time on Web designers, or software programmers to build their websites. They don’t want to spend to have someone else update their websites. What they want is to have control over their content and the freedom to update their sites as frequently whenever necessary. They want to be able to publish their thoughts as soon as it hits them. Online businesses share this same desire – to have control over their content, to have freedom to update their sites whenever needed and to publish their content in a flash. Content management systems help them achieve this, easily. By using a content management system, online entrepreneurs can:

Save time and expend their efforts on marketing their business Implement full authority over their content without extra costs

A content management system provides effective media for managing the informative content. The use of a content management system lowers the operating costs, there-by increasing the profits. The key benefits, achieved through the deployment of a suitable content management system, and weighed against your investments, may be considered as follows:

The content management system renders easier and rapid management of your website information, letting you create, edit, and publish the contents on a website, without any technical programming skill. Your content management system allows you to set up a discipline amongst the individuals, responsible for each management activity of the system, and the departments responsible for disseminating the necessary information required for management of the contents. It is necessary that you maintain the accountability of the system that you are managing. A content management system allows you to track the changes that you are making and maintain a log of work history. This enables you to identify which specific content has been changed, and review the history at times to look at the specific concerned pages that have been changed. You can manage your work-flow through the inherent intelligent feature of such a management system. This will enable you to ensure that your contents are passing through a proper quality procedure before getting published. The process of internal instant messaging and tracking ensures a smooth work-flow process, which provides constant review and control of the management system in place. Best content management system allows you to create a content once, which can be re-used many times. This facility provides the opportunity to deliver the same content to multiple locations in various presentation formats and multiple languages. Your web content management system makes it easy for you to keep your website updated through effective management of your contents, enabling your partners, customers, and your employees to find the correct information at any point of time