Everyone these days instinctively knows what distinguishes a good Web site from a bad one. Bad ones are frustratingly difficult to navigate, or the content is confusing. Every so often, Web managers appear to achieve perfect equilibrium between content amount and value, simplicity of navigation and richness of design. Which pole does your Web site tend towards?
Internet traffic volume is constantly on the increase. Even in Africa, Internet usage between 2000 and 2006 grew over 600%, according to Internet World Stats. The resultant trends are clear: companies that are not investing in processes and systems to manage this increase are poised to decline.
Web content management systems have been around for a long time, but alone they are insufficient to deliver what it takes. It is not about development, design or content - it is about the fusion of all three.
Creative design
Designers are often given free rein regarding the design of a content management platform. The end result is a rich, engaging design. Sadly, the design is sometimes created contrary to the long-term ideals of the Web site itself. A design can never incorporate all the possible navigation sections that a client may want to deploy.
Web content management systems have been around for a long time, but alone they are insufficient to deliver what it takes.
Grant Hodkinson, sales and marketing director of Mint Net
A Web content management system should be configurable so as to incorporate change easily. The problem is whether the design will scale up in parallel too. For example, certain designs deploy navigation systems as graphics, often for specific themes, fonts or colours. It might look good, but it can present complexity, or require unnecessary maintenance when the sections need to be changed by the Web content manager.
Another example is the need for a sub-section of the site to adopt a distinctive, yet complementary design. Often this is implemented as a slightly different colour scheme, or a secondary logo. Designers do not typically plan this kind of capability.
While designers mostly do a sterling job designing a Web site, creative planning and platform capability merging is not their responsibility. The implementer of the content management technology knows the capabilities of the platform, and should be guiding both client and designer.
Collaboration
All too often, customers implement costly Web content management technology and remain bound to continual design changes due to ineffective planning. Since technology is involved in implementing a Web content management system, it is a good idea to bring a development partner on board.
In the same way that a different approach is required for the design, a different approach is required for the development. Traditionally, developers work with forms and databases that have tables with fields and columns. There is often an entity relationship diagram or some other specification. However, content management systems do not refer to fields. Rather, they are about how content is created, manipulated, formatted, aggregated and displayed.
To ensure designers and developers work together to bring a Web content management project to a successful conclusion, effective planning is required. Unfortunately, this is the area that is most often neglected.
Planning a content management project requires special skill and knowledge of the boundaries that must be set for developers and designers alike.
Information architecture
As with any IT project, in Web content management, a lack of a plan is a plan to fail, or at least fall short of the mark. Some of the most significant work in planning goes into the information architecture: dealing with how information is structured on the site. In short, the information architecture helps us ensure that all content pages of a similar type are defined in the same way, and that they can be managed consistently. It also helps everyone understand the sections and sub-sections on the site. Lastly, it helps the organisation understand what elements of the design will be modified to address section-specific branding.
Information architecture is what delivers the most substantial return on investment on a Web content management project. Defining the information architecture, and including related planning activities, can be a lengthy process, but it must always be a collaborative one. Therefore, the following questions should always be asked:
* What types of content will be shown?
* What rules of content re-use must be included?
* Which elements of the design should be segmented to be site-specific and section-specific respectively?
* What classes of content styles will be made available?
* How will these content styles be re-used or re-formatted on other types of pages?
* What portions of the site must automatically update based on other inputs?
Through the implementation of an effective plan and information architecture, a company will go some way to achieving some of the better aims of this niche of content management:
* Being able to re-use content from one section in others according to formatting rules.
* Being able to re-format content for display in different systems or to different devices.
* Being able to automatically update a site based on content across all other areas.
A content management project can be daunting, but with attention paid to the right aspects, it can be more fun and more rewarding than most other IT projects.
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