Choosing a Content Management System (CMS)

** Update: Thursday, July 23, 2009 **
NLC has just released a new whitepaper on Choosing a CMS

On May 28, NLC was happy to present our seminar Choosing a CMS to an engaged audience at Microsoft.  What follows is the presentation and a summary of the key speaking points.

Randy Woods, NLC co-founder, opened the seminar with an overview of the CMS selection process.  Key lessons in his presentation were:

Phase 1

1. Understand your online goals.  A CMS can help you deliver online success if you
2. Next, clearly define what benefits you hope to reap from a CMS.  Now answer the question, do you have the people you need to deliver on these goals?
3. Be sure to involve all stakeholders, business and IT in the process from day one.
4. Have a clear picture of your own contractual and requirements for procurement of a technology product and related professional services.

Phase 2

1. Use your goals to built scenarios – stories that describe the actual day to day operations and tasks that lead to your goals.
2. Publish your scenarios as part of your RFP – forget that list of features.
3. Vet the implementation team – do they have the required experience and expertise to deliver on the project.

Helen Overland, NLC’s Director of Search Engine Marketing, shared best practices for increasing search engine visibility.  Key points from her presentation included:

1. Ensuring you have well formed HTML is step one.  Proper user of H, TITLE tags are critical to the search engine crawlers.
2. RSS feeds – particularly when they can be automatically generated – provide your subscribers and search engines with immediate knowledge of changes to your content.
3. Pingback services can distribute updates quickly and easily to a wide array of interested parties.

Glen McInnis, Practice Lead for Enterprise Content Management wrapped up the presentation component with an overview of recent trends in content management and a demonstration of the Sitecore CMS.  Trends dicussed were:

1. Actionable analytics coming to maturity – site owners measuring online activity and using that knowledge to adapt and refine the online experience.
2. Social technologies
3. Increased integrations of the website and Intranet.
4. Increased integrations of e-commerce platforms and a CMS.

Next Steps

At NLC, we work with a variety of content management and web technologies to help our clients deliver a world-class online experience to their customers and end users. We assist our clients in developing online communities, intranet or extranet portals, brochure-ware marketing sites and fully personalized sites.  Each type of site serves a different business need—however, our goal is to ensure the content technology running your site helps you:

Increase search engine visibility

At NLC, we are skilled and experienced at increasing page rank and driving traffic from all major engines. We provide our clients with tools to optimize content, create search-engine-friendly URLs and redirects and generate effective site maps.

Track leads to drive sales

When combined with your CMS, best-of-breed analytics products like Google Analytics, Web Trends and Omniture and testing suites like Google Optimizer and Omniture Test&Target allow content authors to control analytics and tagging, and to adjust content based on user behaviour.  Feeding key conversions to CRM software like SalesForce, Pivotal or Microsoft allows our clients to turn information into knowledge they can act on.

Deliver a first-rate search experience

Making information easy to find increases conversion rates and can reduce human support costs. Whether working with the built-in search capability of your CMS product or utilizing enterprise-class search functionality from Microsoft FAST, Google or Endeca, we can ensure that your CMS provided users with a top-notch search experience that includes auto-correction and full meta-data integration.

Update and maintain your site quickly and easily

NLC’s add-on wizards provide content authors with even faster ways to share content and manage duplicate content and versioning.  Simplifying these tasks allows you to focus your efforts on delivering results.

Ensure compliance

Compliance standards and regulations increase the overall compatibility of your website and can provide you with peace of mind. After all, dealing with accessibility standards or e-discovery requirements does not have to be an onerous task.  By integrating the appropriate rules and standards in your CMS approach, you will ensure content authors follow the required guidelines and can even aid them in making the correct choices.

Who is NLC?

NLC has been working in the CMS realm since before there were off-the-shelf offerings. In 1994, we built a custom CMS for Mazda that distributed content on vehicles, dealer locations and corporate news and events—since then, NLC has customized content management systems for clients like the United Nations, Heinz, Ball State University and the Canadian Cancer Society.  Check out our portfolio of clients http://www.nonlinearcreations.com/portfolio/

With 15 years of implementation experience and hundreds of CMS deployments, NLC has a deep understanding of how to deliver what our clients want to accomplish via their online efforts. We provide sites that are brand-enhancing and deliver on performance and functionality.

For more information or to schedule an appointment or demonstration with one of our award winning CMS consultants, please email sibbotson@nonlinear.ca