Content Management Systems – Functionality vs Practicality

With a global recession hopefully behind us, Australian businesses intending to redevelop their websites should look beyond functionality and steer more towards practical principles such as getting found on Google and ease of use. But with over 200 known CMS’s in the Australian market alone, sorting through the sales & marketing junk to find a truly usable and search friendly system can be complex.

Difficult to use CMSs can cost companies a lot of money in hidden costs such as:

• lost productivity in figuring out how to use the CMS
• constant need to retrain staff in complicated backend CMS’s
• cumbersome backend CMS’s can require extensive change management reengineering
• copying & pasting from Word can cause design failures, requiring IT to resolve the issue
• copying & pasting from Word can also cause code bloat, thus affecting performance requiring investigation and time
• most systems need to be ‘hacked’ and manipulated to get found on Google, requiring more time & money from your teams
• SEO components such as page titles and page descriptions, in most CMS’s, need to be changed by HTML developers

When redeveloping a website with a CMS, core functionality should cater for about 80% of your requirements. The rest is just marketing “nice to haves” and should be ignored unless it is critical to running your business.

So what core functionality and features should be present in a CMS?

Here’s a guide of functionality we believe every CMS should consist of:

• Be standards based (W3C compliant), as this helps get found by search engines
• Be easy to use, as this is critical to minimise the change management effort
• Be able to manage all aspects of the site (templates, modules, categories, pages etc)
• Not be proprietary but rather an open system that can be integrated with other systems and developed or enhanced when required
• Roles based security (to have administrators, editors, content managers etc)
• Enable marketing staff to manage SEO components such as page titles, page descriptions, meta data, page URLs etc

More and more businesses get sucked in to the functionality a certain CMS has and thus buying decisions are made based on functionality. The problem with this approach is that once the site has gone live, more money is then spent changing and optimising it to cater for search engines.

Too many CMS’s try to be too much to everyone. They become the Swiss army knife of the web world that has all the functionality you will never need. The reality is that you will only ever use 20%-40% of the functionality anyway!

Companies should instead focus more on the end goal of getting more customers. A website should be an extension of your sales and marketing team. A great website, one that is fully optimised and easy to use, will extend its marketing arm and rake in thousands of new leads every day that are ready to be converted into sales.

Brochureware websites (sites that simply have information about you and cannot be found by search engines) are no longer acceptable. Businesses need to probe the real reason for getting a website, and it should be about what your customers want, not what you think they want. A customer who searches out your site, does so with a specific purpose in mind, and failing to provide for that customer’s wishes will force them to look elsewhere. And when ‘elsewhere’ is a click away, your window to sell is quite small.

Therefore, it’s true to say that websites have become the shop faces of today’s business and to think less of your site could be potentially harmful to your business. Building on that metaphor, your ranking on search engines is similar to acquiring a prominent position for your store. However, unlike bricks & mortar shops, improving your SEO rankings is primarily about strong technical decisions and intelligent utilisation of the CMS… a lot cheaper than prime real estate!

In the end, a solid SEO-aware CMS must achieve two aims:

• Produce SEO-friendly web pages that meet the ‘Google’ technical requirements to increase your search engine rankings.
• Allow for your users to easily add content without the need for intense training and re-training.

Again, by reducing the overall functions of your CMS, a proper SEO-friendly CMS will instead focus on the key technical aspects that Google, Yahoo! Or Bing seek out. By using such a practical CMS, your staff will be able to easily improve your sites rankings and increase the number of customers discovering your business.