All successful CMS implementations – regardless of the tools employed – have one thing in common: they focus on maximizing ease of use for the content authors and editors. The marketplace is loaded with tools, and none of them are perfect. The software will only get you so far; a fantastic website or intranet only gets built when the tools are properly and thoughtfully implemented.
Keys to Successful CMS Implementation
For more than a decade, Miller Systems has delivered effective, adoptable CMS solutions. We’ve implemented over 100 projects using a wide range of tools. The key principle behind all of these projects? Recognizing that CMS implementations inherently serve two equally important types of end-users: visitors that will use the site you’re building and editors that will be creating and maintaining the content that those visitors will see and read every day.
- The quality of the content editing and creation experience will have a direct impact on the overall quality of your site. Make it great.
- Include your content editors in the template creation process. Doing so will greatly improve adoption and minimize the need for training. At a minimum, perform some basic User Acceptance testing before delivering templates to editors for use on the production site.
- Define a thoughtful inventory of content templates for your site and your editors to avoid common pitfalls. Delivering the right list of simple, purpose built templates for structured content (like press releases or product descriptions) will always improve the editor experience and ensure design consistency.
- Employ CMS content re-use features to make sites “smart” enough to maintain themselves.
- Keep approval workflows simple. There’s usually an inverse relationship between the complexity of CMS workflow and the amount of content that’s actually created or updated.
- Be mindful about how the CMS will co-exist and/or integrate with applications on your site.
- Will non-technical authors be able to accidentally edit (and break) embedded server side code on pages they manage?
- How will a product description in your CMS co-exist with an e-commerce platform in use?
Does Any of This Sound Familiar? Get In Touch
- My users won’t use the tools we gave them to update our sites.
- The demo the CMS sales guys showed us isn’t anything like what we wound up with.
- We still need to involve IT and developers far more than we want to.
- We’re simply not able to keep our site(s) up to date the way we need to.