My post about SEO last week got me thinking about just what a CMS ought to do for you, the web site manager or owner. With one of my many other hats on, I do a fair amount of business operations design, and I know that a decent system is what makes most business, large or small, sink or swim.
The same is true for the web today. Unless you’re putting together web sites purely for fun (which is probably a nobler endeavour than creating them for profit), there’s just a huge amount of management involved in running a successful, profitable web site (even just a small one!)
So, I got to thinking…
Structure and behaviour
In that SEO post, I touched on the fact that any CMS, indeed any piece of software, will affect how one uses it. In the case of a CMS, this is even more pronounced. Not only does a CMS give you the tools for creating and editing a site, in many ways it is the site itself.
Different packages give different levels of flexibility, but they all have an underlying structure of some form, and that’s going to dictate the structure of your site at many levels—everything from your slug and category format, to menus, to the page layouts themselves. And that’s before we get onto things such as how the interfaces and tools effect how you edit and create pages and content (quick example: a beautiful and well designed image uploader is going to encourage you, at whatever unconscious level, to add more images to your site, and a crap one… isn’t).
So, I hope we can agree that the CMS of your choice is going to affect your web site and how you manage and maintain it. However, that influence is pretty much all implicit at this point.
So, my question is…
How far should a CMS go?
Point number one: I think that no CMS should dictate how you work with your site. That’s a big thing for me, and one of the main reasons why I’ve striven to keep Renaissance as flexible as possible. However, I also think that CMS packages could do a lot more to help you than they do right now.
Or, in other words:
Where’s the management?
It might seem like a silly question, but it’s something that’s bugged me for a long time—ever since I started to get experience with different CMS and blogging packages other than Renaissance*. It just seems to me that content management systems don’t actually manage anything. They don’t even let their users manage anything. They let you create, update and delete content. They provide various useful services (RSS, site maps, APIs, access control, et cetera). But where’s the management?
For example, WordPress lets me do various things—it lets me write new posts and update them, it provides scheduled publishing and feeds and all sorts of other things. But in no way does it help me manage the running of my blog. It doesn’t remind me to keep up a regular posting schedule. It doesn’t give me an overview of my best performing posts or help analyse my comment frequency. It doesn’t even offer particularly useful tools for helping me review past posts.
I’m sure at this point you’re asking, “why should it?” My response is a pretty simple, “why shouldn’t it?” And it is a simple concept. Web sites need constant care and attention, and whether you’re a sole trader or managing a large web team, you need processes and tools to keep on top of it. Anyone who reads sites such as Problogger or SEOmoz or Occam’s Razor or any one of the hundreds of other popular blogging and on-line marketing blogs knows that there is constant work to be done, and it can’t be done haphazardly. You need a structure.
As things stand**, you need lots of external tools to make that happen, if it happens at all (and I know that with the best will in the world, it often doesn’t). If you’re a large company, you might have an enterprise management system or even custom written software. For a one man band or small crew, it might just be a spreadsheet or something funky from 37signals.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with all that, apart from the fact that this is all about web sites. It makes little sense to me to manage your web site with one application and edit it with another (your CMS). I know that web site management crosses over into general business processes rather a lot, but, if you want one application to manage both, it almost makes more sense to me to build your business process management into your web site system than vice versa, even if that does mean making it a part of your CMS.
(As an aside, I did wonder if all this thinking is a solution looking for a problem. I don’t think that’s the case. It’s often pointed out that corporate web sites especially are frequently moribund, and proper integration of management systems into your CMS could be just the solution to that problem).
Now, of course, a CMS can’t and shouldn’t do everything. There’s a line *somewhere* (I’m not sure where). But it could do a lot, and I don’t think it would take much to turn things around. So, here are a few quick…
Ideas
… off the top of my head.
Web site purpose
There are an awful lot of reasons to have a web site. Blogs, brochureware, e-commerce, social networking, the rest. And there are plenty of ways to market them. And combinations of both. And that means that different web sites have very different management requirements.
For example, a site designed to convert targeted PPC traffic needs its sales content testing constantly. Sites designed to attract a lot of organic search traffic need content adding all the time. Blogs need a regular posting schedule. E-commerce sites need fresh product offers and updates. You get the idea.
Would it be nice for your CMS to know what kind of site it was managing, allowing it to present you (fully customisable) tools, information and reminders fit for the purpose?
Review system
How about a simple (but fully configurable) system whereby you could set up regular review reminders for some or all of your content? Whenever review time is reached, a note’s sent to the appropriate editor asking them to take action. They can tick it off when they’ve done it. Content freshness solved.
SEO Triggers
Keyword scores falling? Internal linking structure going awry? Editors not linking out properly? Your SEO guru needs to know!
Update reminders
Having trouble keeping your web site up to date? Set up reminders or nags to help you do it. And because we’re fully integrated here, your CMS can know automatically which sections or topics need the most work.
People watching
One of your moderators or editors lagging behind with their schedule? Your manager needs to know (not to give them a bollocking!)
I’m sure that there are loads and loads more management functions with which a decent CMS could help you. We’ve not even gone near what you could do with big, multi-user sites (and something tells me that’s where the real fun with this lot is).
Summing up
I guess what this is all about is making a CMS that’s an active rather than a passive tool. A tool that actually helps you do your job rather than just letting you do it. That’s definitely where I want Renaissance to go.
And, needless to say, if you have any ideas, please post them below!
Thanks for reading.
* I should point out, Renaissance doesn’t do much of what I’m talking about either (yet).
**I admit, there are probably plenty of packages and plugins that help you do this… maybe I’m just woefully ignorant. Also, I’m really talking about more lightweight solutions here, in Renaissance’s class, not big enterprise packages.
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