CMS - What Every CMS Should Have
The ability to quickly update information on a dynamic website can never be overestimated.
The famous 'webmaster bottleneck' has effectively left CMS content in the hands of the original stakeholders, giving them the power to strengthen the business core aspect of their site at will.
The qualities a CMS can potentially bring to businesses immediately give light to their inherent return on investment.
This article talks about important properties CMS should have.
The first thing to look out for in a CMS is ease of use.
In some ways, the CMS can be thought of as a site within a site - tailored to users who will be adding or changing the content of the site presented to end users.
Typically, this includes having modules available that mimic the existing products to minimize the learning curve necessary to post new articles or contribute to blogs, etc.
A good example is the WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editors commonly available acting like ordinary word processors.
Without ease of use, the 'webmaster bottleneck' effectively turns into a 'user bottleneck', which doesn't address the benefit of speed in a CMS.
Dependable support from a large community is paramount.
Because we're also looking at modularity, usually the modules integrated into the CMS have been developed by members of the community.
If said members do not take accountability or pledge to maintain and support the module in some way, developers would probably opt to develop their own modules from scratch.
We should typically look out for online resources that have searchable modules, containing descriptions, ample documentation, installation instructions and a demo.
Response time should be short if the user has not already found the answer they are looking for on a forum addressing FAQ's, etc.
Another initiative in removing the publishing bottleneck is to ensure that content and presentation are separated.
In the ideal case (which is usually the case), the end user is not concerned with colors, format, font, etc.
The content is at the heart of their work, and publishing the content should remain seamless and homogeneous with the artistic design and theme of the website (presentation layer).
No matter the technology driving the CMS, it's important to look out for a centralized repository that stores the CMS.
This eases migration from development to production (and everything in between), but also makes it easier to share files and maintain the presentation layer.
The famous 'webmaster bottleneck' has effectively left CMS content in the hands of the original stakeholders, giving them the power to strengthen the business core aspect of their site at will.
The qualities a CMS can potentially bring to businesses immediately give light to their inherent return on investment.
This article talks about important properties CMS should have.
The first thing to look out for in a CMS is ease of use.
In some ways, the CMS can be thought of as a site within a site - tailored to users who will be adding or changing the content of the site presented to end users.
Typically, this includes having modules available that mimic the existing products to minimize the learning curve necessary to post new articles or contribute to blogs, etc.
A good example is the WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editors commonly available acting like ordinary word processors.
Without ease of use, the 'webmaster bottleneck' effectively turns into a 'user bottleneck', which doesn't address the benefit of speed in a CMS.
Dependable support from a large community is paramount.
Because we're also looking at modularity, usually the modules integrated into the CMS have been developed by members of the community.
If said members do not take accountability or pledge to maintain and support the module in some way, developers would probably opt to develop their own modules from scratch.
We should typically look out for online resources that have searchable modules, containing descriptions, ample documentation, installation instructions and a demo.
Response time should be short if the user has not already found the answer they are looking for on a forum addressing FAQ's, etc.
Another initiative in removing the publishing bottleneck is to ensure that content and presentation are separated.
In the ideal case (which is usually the case), the end user is not concerned with colors, format, font, etc.
The content is at the heart of their work, and publishing the content should remain seamless and homogeneous with the artistic design and theme of the website (presentation layer).
No matter the technology driving the CMS, it's important to look out for a centralized repository that stores the CMS.
This eases migration from development to production (and everything in between), but also makes it easier to share files and maintain the presentation layer.
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