Web Content Management: Finally Time to keep to Our Promise

Here’s my problem: people keep complaining to me about our current CMS. The marketing department says it won’t let them be ‘agile,’ sales say they don’t have enough leads and the IT department say they’re sick of spending all their time writing code to fix spelling mistakes.

Source: All I Want for Christmas Is a New CMS

Reading this blog post I get a bit frustrated. I am in the Content Management Industry for quite a while. Even in my early years we always sold the promise of easy Web Content Management to our customers. One key message was to allow content owners to easily publish their content without going through IT, just through a simple approval process a maximum.

Reality is different. In a lot of companies the web site is owned by departments, which keep the content owners away from their web pages. The infrastructure is often to complex, the technology used not state of the art.

BUT: I don’t believe it is primarily a technology problem. In my opinion it is very often a management problem. Give the content owners after all easy access and control over their content. In the age, where everybody can easily start their own blog and people are sharing and publishing content on social media, it is after all time to fulfill the promises of easy web content management through empowering the right content owners.

And be tough enough to simple cut off old, outdated pages. Yes, you might lose traffic and so on and so forth. But my feeling is to restart from scratch very often makes more sense then to fix hundreds and more pages. Time to restart.

And keep this in mind:

A B2B web usability report by KoMarketing and BuyerZone found a big disconnect between what B2B buyers wanted to see on a website and the content that was actually there. For the buyers they surveyed, the top must-haves they wanted to see were clear contact details, lots of product information and specifications and pricing. More than half also said product reviews were a must. Check that your website offers all of these things and when it was last reviewed and updated.

Source: The role of social media in B2B buyers’ decision making | CustomerThink