1 November 2011
Everybody, it seems, has a website. But how many can change content, add and move sections, upload files and archive news items all by themselves? And still be 100 percent confident that the website remains professional and attractive regardless of how many changes are made?

A content management system (CMS) can help you to reduce web maintenance costs, update content immediately and maintain quality control.

If you are considering a content-managed system, look for those that can be built or tailored to your specific needs. Everyone will tell you that their CMS is powerful, flexible and simple, but you need to assess how powerful, flexible and simple you need your CMS to be. Off-the-shelf products, even those from established names, boast of their endless features, but if you’re not going to need or use all of these features, why should you pay for them?

Similarly if you adopt an off-the-shelf product you may be tying yourself into a situation where decisions on upgrading, expanding, and adapting are not being made by you. A bespoke system allows you to have the features you need, designed to work in tandem with your organisational structure and with the flexibility to be upgraded as and when required by you.

What to look for:

Access

Think about where and when you, or your colleagues, will be accessing and updating your website from. A web-based system, which doesn’t require any specialist software, can be managed from any location with online access – ideal for home workers or those who hot-desk.

Ease of use

Although extremely advanced technologically, a CMS should be designed to be intuitive and user-friendly so that getting to grips with it is quick and painless. It may be that your staff are highly proficient in HTML code, but this is rarely the case and you will need a simple system that anyone in the office can work with.

Flexibility

Make sure you factor in flexibility and scalability. Your system should provide all the features you need to get started, but have the capability to evolve and grow with your business. Not thinking about this at the design stage can lead to very costly upgrades as your needs change and technology develops.

Features

Being able to sit down with a designer and plan your own CMS is the only way to ensure that it does everything you need it to do (as opposed to an “all things to all men” approach). If you have a small, simple information site updated by just one person, then of course the system you require will be very different from one which will have to maintain a complicated, corporate intranet site running to hundreds of pages, with numerous contributors.

A standard list of specifications might include:

Secure web-based login
Site hierarchy management
Editable content throughout
Automated news upload, removal and archiving
Picture, file or document upload and online image library
Page, section and sub-section addition and removal
Dynamic site map
Two levels of admin access
Site monitoring statistics/analysis.