The best magazine
I observed various issues with the earlier Web CMS's from both a technological perspective and a user point of view.
Circa 2005 I worked for a small, local web design company when the first breed of CMS's were becoming popular.
The premise was that if we could allow our clients to update their own websites then this would provide relief to our customer support team to provide assistant in other "more pressing" areas.
The problem was that although we were able to assign a member of the client's team to be the responsible owner of the content and provide the necessary training to utilise the plethora of features of the CMS, we failed to realise that the responsible owner was neither an expert in writing effective web copy or a marketing expert.
Afterall, we were working with predominantly small businesses who are used to assigning their teams to multiple tasks.
Therefore, multitasking and being generalists were traits of the majority of their team members.
Validon't From a technological perspective, the CMS's were throwing up all sorts of anomalies which our development team and the original 3rd party vendor of the CMS were tackling on an adhoc basis.
We also had limited resources and our main problems were Web Browser compatibility and the fact that the CMS that we were using would invalidate any clean code that we had managed to pass through a W3C Validator.
That is in the past though and many modern day Content Management System's can provide clean, valid code and that is fantastic but many of the issues that I have raised and a few that I haven't raised still crop up.
Clients still require CMS training but many of the clients I speak to have already had at least some experience of using a CMS.
This does help to decrease the learning curve.
But what about the lack of web writing expertise? Well, this is still an issue but, thankfully, there are many solutions.
Riding the Gravy Train Internet Marketing firms such as ourselves now run courses and seminars which tackle issues such as writing effective web content.
Half a day's training won't give you the skills and experience of a bona-fide web journalist but it should provide a sound basis to become a competent content writer.
Long term this should provide a better return on investment for the business.
Though outside the scope of this article, it would be interesting to compare the correlation between staff who are sent on training courses to update their company's blog and those who are sent on the courses to update the actual website.
Source: ...