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Make
no mistake - if you are running a substantive web site without
a CMS, you will hit a wall where your eBusiness is no longer
sustainable because you can't update your site reliably
or quickly enough. From that point, you will need to tear
down almost your entire web infrastructure to put a CMS
in its place.
What
content do you have, and where is it going?
Think
for a moment about all the content assets that you need
to manage. On your site, you might have:
- Your
products' specifications, prices and benefits.
- Product
illustrations
- Production
information
- Product
categories
- Special
promotions
- Terms
and Conditions
- Site
navigation links
- Availability
- Support
information
- Developer
features
- Press
releases
- Jobs
- Office
addresses, maps and directions.
- Logos,
photographs and diagrams
CMS
- The Benefits
Job
sharing
Many
sites are operated by a team distributed between offices,
companies or even countries. Because all the major tools
have a web interface, participants can perform their task
and view its results from anywhere with web access.
Speed
to market
When
you have a CMS, you suddenly have a tremendous advantage
in the time it takes to react to market intelligence. You
can write, edit and publish updates in a matter of minutes
without suffering from "WebMaster Bottleneck".
Reduced
maintenance costs
By automating
the building of pages on your site, you will cut substantial
sums from the site's maintenance costs. A reasonably content
rich site could need 250 or more updates a day, each averaging
around 2 man-hours to produce and test. As a Web Publisher
with the competence to get the edits right and not break
the site will cost from $55 to $155 per day.
Advance
and refresh
You
can specify dates and times for the content to go live and
be archived or removed. You can also impose review dates
to ensure that information is not simply left on the site
to rot until a new product replaces it. If content is removed
or archived, the CMS will ensure that the remaining content
is still structurally consistent, without leaving orphaned
links to the deleted page/image etc..
Version
Control
At its
simplest, this means that you know, and can control, what
content is supposed to be live today, what is sitting ready
to go live next week, and what is being prepared by your
team for the week after, and keep them separate on an piece-by-piece
basis. It
also means that you can have one version of a news story
live now, one being written to update it in an hour's time,
and one incorporating the press release which is embargoed
until tonight.
Content
Syndication
Many
sites are now pulling content from, and pushing content
to, systems run by other organisations, best handled by
a CMS. At its simplest, this will allow you to pull headlines
and articles from a relevant news site, or gain an income
stream by syndicating your own material to other site. Alternatively,
it could be a way to share product specifications, prices,
marketing information and availability with suppliers and
vendors.
You
don't need a CMS (yet) if...
At least
4 of the following are true:
- You
have a small organisation where web publishing is in-house,
and can communicate exceptionally well with content creation
- Your
site is small and doesn't update frequently in content
or structure
- Your
online operation doesn't perform any personalisation
- You
don't integrate content between the web site and retail
outlets, call centres, email newsletters or other channels
- You
don't need to manage specifications from R&D to customer
support
- You
are not offering customers a community where they can
contribute to a site
- One
individual has intimate knowledge of the entire site (and
others have intimate knowledge over their own sections)
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