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Web CMS ROI
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Web Content Management (WCM) systems exist solely
for their ability to enhance operational efficiency.
Each product in the market does this in
different ways. The following is a broad view of
the typical benefits a WCM solution
offers your organization.
Productivity
Most web sites have outgrown their roots. Generally,
they have followed approximately the same growth
path. They started
as a small static site, then evolved into
a larger site - incorporating
dynamic functionality, eventually
grew into a medium or large site with a broad array
of practices, multiple data sources,
multiple channels
of publishing, and a larger body of stakeholders.
Somewhere between the medium and larger size phases,
management of the site starts
to become inefficient. And typically publishing and
maintenance becomes painful for both the content
producers and the personnel maintaining the infrastructure.
A
well-deployed WCM solution addresses both of these
concerns by decentralizing information publishing,
maintaining organizational standards, and rationalizing
web site infrastructure. The
result is authors create, editors approve,
IT
focuses on infrastructure,
and your information gets published in an efficient
manner.
Best Practices
Web content presentation must be standardized.
If you have ever reviewed an HTML publishing standards
document for a medium to large corporation you will
know that they are typically unwieldy and you can
probably guess that they are almost never completely
adhered to. A
WCM solution can automate 80-90%
of an
organization's
web presentation and metadata standards by
providing web-ready publishing templates for content
authors to utilize, but not modify. This moves the
enforcement of standards from a cumbersome document
on the Intranet directly into the processes for publishing
and directly under the control of the publishing
system owners.
Time-to-Market
A good WCM
system has the
ability
to both schedule and
reuse content.
Scheduling content means that the business users
can complete the authoring, editing, and approval
processes prior
to the
publish date, schedule the information for
future publishing, and then move on to other things.
Once
the publish date arrives, the content automatically
goes live. If the WCM system allows for reuse
of content,
your scheduled information can appear in multiple
pages and
potentially
on multiple
sites,
all at the right time. Scheduling
and reuse reduces time-to-market and improves the
user experience.
Content Quality
Most people and organizations
function best when they when they enjoy
what they are doing. Since your new WCM solution
now manages publishing workflow, since your
content authors can now quickly check and manage
the status of the content they own, since you no
longer have to chase the IT department around to
get new content posted or minor updates made, everyone
is a bit more relaxed and everyone can put just that
much more focus on producing and editing high quality,
visitor-relevant content.
Content Relevance
Personalization is the
ability to make on the fly decisions about
what information or resources are most relevant
to the current user.
Unfortunately,
Personalization has gotten a bad reputation. This
is largely due to its failure to generate
the once promised return on
investment.
What
may not be as well known is that most commercial
web content management products implement some form
of content or experience personalization.
Personalization implements a business rule
such as "user
or group in segment A should see or not see content
that is in resource group Z".
It starts as
simple
as that and can get much more sophisticated.
When Personalization is implemented in an
intelligent manner, not only do you increase the
relevance of your online content, but you also decrease
the number of web pages you need to publish.
Reuse
A well-designed
WCM product allows you to reuse content. It should
implement a model of content that
is removed from the concept of a"page".
This abstraction allows content objects
to be combined in any number of delivery formats.
This flexibility allows your content authors to reuse
each other's work in any number of a site's web pages,
possibly in emails and documents and, depending upon
the product selected, across
any number
of
web sites.
Find Out More
Cylogy's Business Solutions consulting practice specializes
in Content Management solutions.
Our services include business analysis, procurement
advising, proof of concept, information architecture,
CMS customization, solution
deployment, and personalized training.
 Contact
us today to learn more about how we
can help.
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