by Vienna

Created on: September 28, 2007

1) A CMS enhances the consistency of the look and feel across your entire website, by forcing content owners to stick to corporate fonts, colours and layout, rather than coming up with their own customised look and feel for their particular "unique" section, which may not reflect your brand.

2) A CMS significantly reduces your reliance on information technology professionals to update content on your websites. This is beneficial because the skills of IT employees are generally under-utilised on the task of updating content. It is more cost effective to hire an administration assistant to update content; or to decentralise the task back to the "content owners" in the business.

3) A CMS allows you to decentralise the updating of content to those people in the business that are highly knowledgeable about the content itself - this often results in content owners taking more responsibility for the timeliness and accuracy of their content.

4) Once a CMS is set up with corporate templates, the task of updating and maintaining the website is less time consuming than if you had to create every new added page from scratch. This allows you to have more timely content.

To ensure you get maximum benefit from your CMS:

a) Make sure it is easy to use by a person with no programming knowledge or skills. Some CMS' are not very user friendly.

b) Ensure that you have a solid publication approval process and accountability for the accuracy, timeliness and relevancy of content lies with someone in the business via regular auditing and quality feedback surveys. There should also always be two pairs of eyes reviewing content before it is published.

c) Ideally a good CMS should have functionality that will allow you to monitor content expiry dates and receive periodic notification about expired content, to keep content fresh.

FINALLY - Always put more energy into the content, information architecture and labelling on your sites, rather than look & feel or snazzy flash intros that the majority of web users skip. The real value of a website is in its usability - and this is defined by the structure and content of the site NOT the flash modules and colours!

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