20-10-2010, 12:04 PM
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Web Content Management Blueprint
By Ian Lurie
President, Portent Interactiv
The most expensive component of any website is content maintenance. Keeping your site up-to-date is essential: A web site with stale content is useless to customers, dropped by search engines, and an all-around bad investment. But fresh, timely content means constant updates, and that’s expensive. Do you hire outside designers to make simple updates, or send your own staff to training courses? Both options are costly. Another, better answer is a Content Management System, or CMS. A well-implemented CMS lets you control your site’s content, without learning HTML. But these systems come in many shapes and sizes. What is a CMS? What type of CMS do you need? How much should it cost? In this article, I’m going to try to shed some light on what has become a very, very crowded field, and provide you with guidelines for selecting — and making the most of — a CMS. First, you need to understand what a CMS does, and what it can do for your organization. What Is a CMS? Software does not a CMS make. There’s a lot more to a successful CMS than a CD-ROM and a few thousand lines of code. Then what is a Content Management System? A piece of software you buy, just like a word processor? A combination of software and hardware? In the real world, a CMS is a combination of three things: