Some content managed web sites we've designed...
- The Motorboat Museum
- Companies for Sale
- Wallpaper Direct & Designer Paint
- Caribbean.co.uk
- Action for Business Skills
- The Big Laundry
Content management systems put you in control of your content. No surprise there, then.
It's just that some content management systems let you manage more content more easily than others. For example, I'm writing this directly into the DOT site CMS at home late in the evening. It will be published live on the site in about ten minutes.
The fact is I haven't changed the copy in this article (until now, October 28th 2003) since we first published this site back in 2000. Our programmers worked long and hard to give me this facility, so is this overkill?
Well, it's not for us. The core functionality that lets me update this article online right now (and add and delete services at my whim) is the same functionality that allows me to easily publish our news articles to the world (see top right), and the same functionality that let me update our clients (and the US/Barbados/UK project team) on the progress of the Caribbeanb2b portal this morning.
Extending content management to our service lines has been a marginal investment for us over the core system – so why not include services?
Most corporate and e-commerce web sites need to make sure they can manage their news content, product (and particularly pricing) content, and their contact information dynamically, while much other information e.g. services, privacy policy, how to find us, etc. remains more or less static. It's advisable to concentrate the spend on making the CMS behind the key areas as fully-featured (wysiwyg editing, easy archiving, etc.) and as easy to use as possible.
Optimisation, schmoptimisation
A modular content management system should be implemented from the article level up to provide common functionalities that can be leveraged across all the key dynamic areas of a site, and that should take into account metadata.
The DOT CMS automatically publishes articles in a structured way with sensible titles and meta tags generated for the search engines. This means our site perfoms extraordinarily well on important search terms.
Try searching for IBM Business Consulting Services on Google or Yahoo! Our client feature linked from the column at top left (above) ranks second only to the IBM Business Consulting Services web site at ibm.com/bcs. The same remarkably high ranking goes for the terms P&O Cruises, Shell Expro and many other clients and projects we'd particularly like the world to know about – and we're hardly even trying. We can laugh in the face of search engine optimisation services because our content management strategy makes optimisation redundant.
So now you're sold on content management. All you have to find is your content managers. If you're a PricewaterhouseCoopers that's not a problem (although you'll need to decide if the content team in New York will do the work, or should it be London, Paris...). If on the other hand you're a more modestly-sized enterprise, you'll have to work hard to find editorial skills with limited resources, which often means exisiting staff doubling up as authors and publishers.
Where systems grow large and complex the burden of maintaining information can be onerous, and where possible we advise organisations to devolve content management responsibility around the stakeholders. Editorial specialisms should be placed in the control of subject matter experts around and allied to the organisation, and directories management should be devolved to the individual listings owners themselves. A CMS with workflow tools and tiered publishing rights that follows this distributive model eases the burden on the publishing editors, who are freed up to concentrate on strategy and commisioning.
Write once, publish many
Dynamic database-driven content is of course readily available to publish again in other formats. A directory of hotels and travel agents developed for a destination web site (for instance) can be easily published again as a personalised printable guide, using extracts from the same content.
To see a fully content-managed 32-destination, 25 activity matrix site actively managed in six languages by authors in the UK, Europe and the US (and by the individual owners of 6,000+ directory listings) take a look at the site and the personalised PDF format interactive trip planner™ at doitcaribbean.com
To find out more about DOT content management systems talk to:
Peter Warren +44 (0)1273 477 700
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The Motorboat Museum
The Motorboat Museum web site features a wide range of managed content including news and events, information on the ever-expanding museum collections and e-learning resources for schools and educational visitors. Museum staff update the system regularly through a comprehensive but easy-to-use web interface.
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Companies for Sale
Companies for sale puts people who would like to buy a UK company in touch with company owners who are looking to divest a business.
Opportunities are posted anonymously and deals and introductions are brokered by Grant Thornton's Corporate Finance team.
The CMS also generates on-brand documentation in Adobe PDF format.
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Wallpaper Direct & Designer Paint
These highly successful e-Commerce sites offer an enormous range of product, including 11,000+ variations on size and finish of paints, and wallpaper and paint collections from 20 household name designer brands.
Products, clients, customer feedback...
11 February, 2004
Just wanted to say - great site! In my view you're the best site, easy to navigate, no faffing, clear text, takes you where you want to go next, lets you play! Thanks.
Anne, Leeds
...and customer accounts are all managed within the CMS, and visual assets in the CMS work seamlessly with Flash-built interactive visualisation tools showing roomsets.
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Do it Caribbean
The Doitcaribbean.com family of web sites including the UK version www.caribbean.co.uk are the official global Caribbean Tourism Organisation sites marketing tourism in the region.
The DoitCaribbean CMS manages editorial, news and events for 34 destinations across 25 special interest sectors, and combines this information with directory listings for thousands of hotels, restaurants, and attractions in the Caribbean, plus many thousands of travel agents, agencies and tour operators in the main origin market countries around the world. Directory listings are pulled from the CTO's business-to-business site www.caribbeanb2b.com and from their extranet at www.onecaribbean.org – both DOT designed and programmed sites.
Language content is localised automatically to the visitor, who can create inuitively pull from this contenet to produce their own highly personalised PDF guides featuring tailored brochure content from a range of tour operators with our Interactive Trip Planner.
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Action for Business Skills
Action for Business Skills is a web site to support an intitative of the Sussex Learning and Skills Council. It's designed to match businesses in Sussex with tailored training provision from local Higher Education Colleges and private training providers.
The site CMS lists the specialisms of each college and training provider and allows businesses to locate the most appropriate training facility through a highly interactive Flash map interface.
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The Big Laundry
London's biggest collection and delivery laundry service runs its customer accounting and delivery functions directly through the content-managed site we designed for them.
Collections and deliveries are scheduled online in the back end, while customers place their orders and administer repeat orders and special instructions through the front end.
The Big Laundry is a highly successful business with plans to extend to areas beyond London in the future. Our CMS and web site - a 'laundry in a box' will support this most unlikely of eBusinesses way into the future.
