When “content management” = “managing the content”
Published 11 Jan 2005
Gerry McGovern writes an interesting article on his 10 predictions for web content management in 2005. I especially hope point number 1 pans out:
1. The editor—the person who knows the difference between good and bad content—will get increasing authority for the website.
More and more, I’m frustrated that “content manager” means a technological solution, rather than a person who knows their content. As the university web site get more and more pressure to standardize it’s web content, institutions are turning to sophisticated and expensive CMS solutions.
I am tending to think that we would be better served to hire a content specialist— an editor— that can work with the departments to produce good content and the web office to get it posted. As Jeff Veen puts it in an inspired article:
Content management is not a technology problem. If you’re having trouble managing the content on your Web site, it’s because you have an editorial process problem.
We need a new model. Something tells me that adding another decentralized process to our already decentralized university web site is going to fail.
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Commentary
Bill writes
Jan 23 at 08:05 AM #
“institutions are turning to sophisticated and expensive CMS solutions”
They never seem to want to pay the cost required to get that “perfect” automated CMS, either… They want it, and can’t get away from that ideal during the discovery process, and more often than not, it seems they end up with a system that requires a good deal of human process to make it work well… so you’d think they’d learn from this that it would be a better expenditure of $$ to have a full time human content manager that is web-savvy than to drop so much cash for a “mythically” perfect automated system.
sigh…
Andrea writes
Jan 24 at 11:38 AM #
Yes, I think it is definitely a myth that a system can work well automatically. I don’t think there’s a tool out there that doesn’t need to be customized for a user’s specific needs. CMSs assume that everyone needs the same thing out of their web sites, and that’s just not the way it is.
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