Quick and long term wins from adopting a CMS
During our paper (or white board) prototyping session today I had a bit of a light bulb moment on how to sum up the short and long term aims of adopting a CMS.
In the short term we are aiming to centralize and therefore be able to reuse content. In the long term we are aiming to map the relationships between this content.
This is not necessary applicable to everyone looking to adopt a CMS. I suggest it should be the aims of any organization looking to migrate their web site of hundreds or thousands of pages over a phased transition. These aims are pretty fluffy and are certainly not conclusive, but I think it’s a nice way to sum up the fundamental nature of a large Content Management System.
If you do indeed have a web site or a group of web sites with thousands or even tens of thousands of pages, as we at the University of Kent do, then you are unlikely to be thinking about rolling a CMS out overnight. If you are then good luck to you, we would love to hear how you get on. A much more practical method of implementation is to consider what content is going to benefit from the features of a CMS most, and grow out from there.
Quick win: Content reuse
Web sites of the size we are talking about are almost undoubtably going to need to reuse certain content and I would suggest this is the content that wants to be consider for a CMS first. Your nonCMS sites can resuse this content using web services and RSS feeds. For us this content has been split into three “Content Factories”.
The Publicity Factory will hold news, events and announcements for reuse in news pages and feeds across our web sites.
The Profile Factory will hold details on people, buildings, departments and services for reuse in the online directory, academic profile pages and a research and expertise web site.
The Programs Factory will hold courses and modules for reuse in departmental websites, the online prospectus and potentially offline print materials.
This will allow us to publish content in multiple places across our web sites from a single centralized location. Using taxonomy we can even ensure that it appears in the right place for the right users all from our centralized content factories.
Long term win: Relate content
As more and more content is added to the CMS it will become easier and easier to determine relationships between it. For example if you start with a centralized news system with only a few articles in it there is not much you can do to recommend content related to an article. As more news articles are added to the CMS you can start recommending other articles that may be of interest to a user. When you bring your people profiles into the CMS you may be able to start linking to people that are named in articles. As your CMS grows there will be more relationships that you can take advantages of. In the end you will have to decide which relationships are of most use to your users and prioritize these.
Taxonomy comes first
Just because you wont be able to start determining relationships between content initially doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be categorizing and tagging it from the get go.
Although there may be some exceptions (the home page) I’m going to assume you aren’t planning to painstakingly hand pick where each piece of content should appear. In order to automatically determine where it should be displayed you will need some sort of categorization.
It also vital you (and your publishers) are tagging content with relevant themes and keywords. When there is enough content to start suggesting related content this will allow you to do so. Otherwise you will be caught in the catch22 of not tagging content because there is no way to follow these relationships and not implementing a method to follow relationships because you don’t have the taxonomy to support it. In the predicament of the chicken and the egg, taxonomy comes first.
