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How to Start Choosing a Web Content Management System
by Robert Kraai 07/08/2011
In the course of my work, I come across many Web Content Management systems. They all have their good points, and their bad points. I have seen implementations of WCM software that I would consider to be subpar become completely acceptable to the organization that chose it, and I have seen implementations of very powerful WCMs capable of everything the client needed become trash that needed to be ripped and replaced. The difference between success and disaster is in planning and expectations. The chosen WCM needs to help fill in the gap between the plan and reality cutting time and money out of having to build it all yourself. How can you make sure that you choose the right WCM to fill this role?
The market today, and likely the market for the foreseeable future, is flooded with options. It is difficult for an organization to evaluate what WCM is the right one when the evaluation criteria do not guarantee a successful implementation. It seems almost every web company has some kind of WCM of their own that they are pushing. You have to be careful to choose a WCM that will be around and is supported for the future. You also have to be careful to navigate the sales hype and product buzz or you might set expectations that the implementation cannot achieve. Being too open minded means evaluating hundreds of options, but being too close minded might mean moving forward with an option that limits the future of what you can do with your Internet or Intranet presence.
Not all WCMs cost money to acquire, but all of them cost time and money to implement and maintain. The worst possible scenario is to acquire a WCM and spend years on services putting it in place before any piece of it is live. The web does not stand still, and ideas for innovative web features that might put your company on the map today, might be standard practice two years from now. A key component to product selection is to have the vision of the site mapped out before product selection with priorities assigned to each requirement. The priorities will help in creating a phased roll out. This does not have to be full graphic layouts with every detail meticulously documented. No site will remain exactly as envisioned by the time it rolls out (and remember that the web changes daily). It could be simple white board drawings and a list of features in a document. This documentation should have all the highlights mentioned as well as a vision for future growth.
Open Source versus Commercial products is a debate that continues to grow as the Open Source community continues to build on its product base. As mentioned above, don't confuse Open Source with "free." Some Open Source products actually take more time and money to implement and maintain at the level your organization requires than a commercial product that might come ready to install and go for your particular needs. You also should not confuse a Commercial product with an install and go model. Some commercial products require a lot of tweaking to get to the organizational requirements. The real difference between Open Source and Commercial is in the support and future road map. All WCM implementations require support in order to keep up with the ever changing vision your sites will have. You need to find the product from the either Open Source or Commercial that fits the features and requirements you have laid out in your documentation.
Both Commercial and Open Source require front end work. Since your site does not look like any other site, and will have different content, and will have different navigation (topology), and will have different graphics and HTML, and will have different features... you get my point. Your site is unique to your organization. It may have features and ideas that other sites have, but it will present them differently than most any other site. That means that your front end, the part that people see, will require work that is not magically shortened by a WCM (no matter what the hype). The pieces that a WCM can provide on the front end include support for the features you want your site to provide (like blogs, wikis, calendars, user login, SEO support, multisite support, and others). Each of these features will still need work to make them fold into your site's look and feel.
If you have enough time and money, you could find an implementation team that could take any system and make it "work for" anything you wanted it to do (within the scope of web technology or back end interfaces to other systems). You could spend years taking the simplest technology and making it run your 300,000 page multisite social application... but one of your goals should be reducing the time to market with the WCM technology you are investing in. The WCM plays the role of removing the complication of bridging the gap between innovative ideas and a finished product. The choice of WCM needs to be made to enable the implementation team to get your ideas from paper to the web as fast as possible within the budget.
That enablement should build from the capabilities you currently have or want to have. This doesn't mean that you should stick with a technology just because you have it in house, but it should play a factor in weighing the options. Again, don't choose a system just because you have the technology in house. This is just one factor to consider. No matter what choice you make, training will be part of the result, and you will have to determine how much is warranted. You don't want to spend your entire budget bringing people up to speed, but, on the other hand, you don't want people under-trained and churning with slow progress trying to get things done either.
Some of the questions you might ask are:
- What contribution will your IT department make?
- Who will be writing content, adding pages, or otherwise updating the site?
- Who will manage registered users, if you have them?
- Who will change the site look and feel when needed?
- What expertise do you expect to contract for the implementation?
- What expertise is needed to migrate from the existing system?
- How much training will be needed to bring your people up to speed?
The final product should have a goal of limited or zero IT involvement for daily activities allowing the actual business users to be empowered and capable of managing their site goals on their own. You may want to contract all or part of the implementation, but you should be aware that some of it will require expertise from an individual or group that has worked on many implementations and not just yours.
The long term ROI of the WCM is measured by the success of bringing your ideas to fruition within the budgets of time and money and how it supports driving the business goals. Your ideas may rest on converting clicks to sales, or on creating a large social network. Your ideas may simply be to get your company recognized in the market. Your ideas may be to bring together a huge legacy maintenance nightmare of multisite multiplatform web content into one system, or you might just want a web page that you can easily change without IT involvement. How will a WCM contribute to the business goals that drive these ideas? Will the WCM reduce man hours in daily maintenance, or will it provide the features out of the box that the site needs (meaning reducing development time)? The WCM you choose needs to support your ideas to the fullest extent and come within the budget you are constrained by.
Supporting your ideas means you have to know generally how much traffic and performance you need to support. You need to know if your chosen WCM should have special capabilities like supporting large multisite implementations or having a rich social media package. You also need to know how to measure the success of the implementation and how the WCM can/should help to gage that.
The WCM will cost time and money. No solution is a magic bullet that you can get away from having to spend one or the other. Open Source solutions may seem free, but they will incur time and expertise that you have to pay for in order to get them up and running and maintain going forward. For profit solutions may seem fully ready to go in the demo, but they will also require time and expertise to fit them into your solution. The initial release may have to be scoped so that the first features plus the cost of the WCM implementation fit within the budget. You may have to do some juggling to determine the best planed outcome.
So, before you start to choose a product, you need to figure out the following high level questions independent of technology or WCM choice:
- Map out your ideas and expectations for the completed site or sites.
- Determine the commitment, roles, and skills of the people that will maintain the site.
- Determine the traffic and special capabilities that the WCM needs to support.
- Determine the ROI measures for your business drivers.
- Determine the company budget for the project.
---Bob