Five tips on choosing the right content management system

With so many modern content management systems (CMS) offering so many add-ons, it’s all too easy to lose track of the basics. So what features should your CMS include as standard?

It’s easy to be impressed by content management systems generally if you’re not a web developer. You type in copy, upload pictures, and – hey presto – they instantly transform into a beautifully finished page. Except that sometimes the transformation isn’t all that beautiful, and occasionally the finished page doesn’t rank that well. Add to that the increased importance of being able to publish across multiple platforms and you have the beginnings of a modern CMS ‘wish list’.

CMS and design

Content is king but, where your CMS is concerned, ‘content’ should apply as much to design as it does to copy. Your content may read beautifully but if it’s poorly presented it won’t be read at all. If it can’t be ‘read’ by search engines it might not even get found.

For ease of use many off-the-shelf CMS provide page templates built around image and text placeholders. You simply drop your pictures and text into the appropriate containers. Depending on how they’ve been coded however, you can end up with large empty spaces if the word count falls short, or distorted imagery if the accompanying pictures aren’t cropped correctly. Where static templates are used care should be taken to measure word counts based on the actual space available.

CMS should also make removing content as easy as adding to it. Archived material can occasionally be very useful to visitors, but in other circumstances it can also give a false impression that you’re not keeping your website up to date.

CMS and SEO

Make sure that your site is as user-friendly to human visitors as it is to search engine bots. Content should be engaging, read well, and be as easy on the eye as it is to navigate, but it must also tick all the right boxes for search engine traffic too.

When creating or adapting a website using a CMS your SEO objectives should be factored in from day one. At the very least your CMS should allow the following:

• Static keyword rich URLs
• Flexible meta data, enabling changes to page titles, descriptions and keywords
• Search friendly navigation not linked to flash or images

The ability to be able to make changes at coding (HTML) level – and not just to the text itself – is very important. That said, don’t lose sight of the principal reason why most companies buy a CMS in the first place: to quickly and easily add content to their website. Make sure that it is easy to do so. Fresh content is rewarded by search engines.

CMS and SMMS and multi-channel marketing

A good old fashioned CMS may help you to create a website that is easy to manage and well optimised, but increasingly that just isn’t enough. Nowadays, your online presence extends beyond your own website, to paid-for and shared media across many platforms. Facebook, Twitter and industry-specific websites open the door to potentially huge visitor numbers via optimised in-bound links. The newly upgraded ribaproductselector.com, for example, offers specifiers the facility to download a wide variety of document types, all linked back to you. Those that download your CPD information represent a conversation just waiting to happen.

Today’s content management systems need to move beyond publishing content to managing communication. Although there are social media management systems (SMMS) available, currently the simplest way to share content across Twitter etc is still to click on the ‘share’ button. This represents a future challenge for CMS.

CMS and mobile

A further complication (or opportunity, depending on your perspective) is that professionals are increasingly accessing digital content via their mobile smartphones. While many CMS offer plug-ins or extensions that claim to convert an existing website into one suitable for viewing on mobiles industry experts still advocate using mobile-specific CMS.

Advantages (of mobile CMS) include their ability to detect the device being used, and to adapt content accordingly. Similarly, they make it easier to optimise content for a variety of operating systems. iPhone, Andriod and Symbian phones, for example, use different coding to provide click-to-call functionality. Without the ability to detect the handset being used this can’t be accessed.

Putting it all together

Traditionally, CMS have been created to manage ‘your content’. But in the modern marketing era, ‘your content’ is as likely to be found on third-party websites as on your own. Increasingly, it is likely to be found across multiple platforms. Without your input it risks being categorised incorrectly and, as a result, not being found.

Make sure your information is found and categorised correctly on the new ribaproductselector.com. It includes a bespoke content management system that can accessed via your own ‘My Account’ facility. It’s fully optimised, cross-platform, includes a faceted search facility (that has already resulted in over 80,000 pages being indexed on Google) and costs nothing!*

Within the next few days you should receive details on how to access and update your information on ribaproductselector.com. Please check your inbox for our email.

 

* Basic entry costs nothing. Upgraded Standard and Premium entries are available.

 

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