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Contented Management

Contented Management

Create a commercial persona

There’s a lot of stuff on the web about knowing your audience. It’s pretty obvious really: understand who the people are who visit your site, the kind of people who you want to attract to your site, and provide content and services to them in a way they understand. The process for doing this is well-documented too. You may already have developed a number of personae to represent your audience, but have you created a persona who will pay money to be associated with your site?

Your readership and advertisers may have surprisingly divergent requirements. Advertisers aren’t necessarily interested in your audience: they’re interested in your audience’s money and in their own reputation. We’ve all been to deeply unattractive sites with great content (this site may well be one of them) and we’re satisfied with the look and feel because we know our way around.

But when it comes to advertising your product on an ugly page, it’s a quite different proposition. You can attract loads of traffic to your site, but why would a prestige supplier want to promote their product on an ugly page? Advertisers are attracted by things that are new: rich media, web 2.0 functionality (whatever that may be), boxes with curved edges, regular font sizes in Helvetica… All right, that’s quite a cynical view, but it’s hard to sell space on a site that is visually unattractive.

So even if your audience are telling you that they like the simplicity of your pages, pause to think. If they’ll put up with ugly pages, they’ll put up with beautiful pages as long as the content is good. And if you have beautiful pages, you may even make some money out of your content.

Philippe Parker on | 20 December 2007

Contented Management

You speak the language, we do the grammar

When I was at university, I was one of a somewhat rare group who enjoyed structuralist critical theory. In a nutshell, this states that since all literature is made up of components of grammar (phonemes, adjectives, syntax, etc.) you can describe any text according to this grammar. At its most basic a narrative is state X → event Y → state Z which is different to state X.

Perhaps this is why content management appeals to me. There’s a set of paradigms (content types) that can be described through adjectives (metadata). There are verbs (workflow) and syntax (navigation), and content can be represented in different declensions (templates). But what the content management system is expressing is different each time. The content is the language, while the CMS is the grammar.

So an FAQ has similar composition whether it’s aimed at specialist user communities or the general public; a press release has the same structure whether it’s displayed in English or in French; content can have different “skins” depending on the person viewing the page. When implementing your content, I really don’t care what the content contains, just how people are going to produce and consume it.

A key point to remember about grammar however is that it evolves. Common usage changes the rules. How many supermarkets state “10 items or less” rather than the correct “10 items or fewer”? And how many people know the difference?

So you have to be aware that your requirements will change and the grammatical model for your CMS may need to evolve. If you pick a model with more complex content management processes — component-based systems like Tridion or Percussion say — you may find your users struggling initially. But if you pick simple page-based tools like EpiServer, your contributors may not be able to express themselves in the way they want, such as creating more complex content relationships.

So when picking a CMS technology, you need to think about the complexity of your content management tasks, the processes and structure you’ll want to exploit. Does the system speak your language? Try a few phrases and see. Get the suppliers to show you how you would achieve key tasks around content creation, publication and relationships and pick the language that isn’t double-Dutch.

Philippe Parker on , , | 19 December 2007

Contented Management

Oracle’s challenge: know your product

Last week I attended the Oracle User Group UK conference, with warm enthusiasm and a heavy cold. User groups can be a great way for clients to share implementation experiences, as well as an opportunity to collar suppliers and get a less sanitised view on product roadmaps. I have heard that the Stellent user community wasn’t particularly active, but Oracle are well used to running user groups for the rest of their product range, so this was part of a very large event.

One speaker (I’ll preserve his anonymity) who seemed to strike a chord with delegates raised the point that his organisation’s implementation partner seemed relatively uninformed about Stellent, and that poor decisions around customisation and bespoke development had led to a poor reputation for the product. We’ve already discussed the product vs. implementation issue in a previous post, but the fact that lots of Stellent clients seemed to have the same problem suggests two things to me.

Firstly, the product may be difficult to implement well. Customisations tend to be required for content entry, so perhaps Stellent didn’t know its audience as well as it should have done. This view is perhaps corroborated by the latest release of version 10gR3 which is now bundled with the Ephox rich text editor (already supplied with IBM content manager and Vignette). This attempts to address some of Site Studio’s issues with cross-platform compatibility and accessibility.

Secondly, there’s a problem with product understanding, not just among implementation partners but within Oracle itself. The Stellent partner base in the UK has traditionally been relatively small. Small systems integrators have focussed on the product’s document management capabilities, with web publishing seen as something of a bonus feature rather than an end in itself. The partners are not web specialists, while the real web specialists — design and build media agencies — haven’t really invested in the product because they see it as more than just web, potentially stretching their capabilities. This is exacerbated by the need to train developers in a proprietary scripting language, IDOC.

Now the limited numbers of the core Stellent team are being swelled by Oracle’s professional services arm. But these aren’t content management specialists, and that’s obvious to many clients who may balk at paying Oracle’s day rates in return for staff on a steep learning curve.

So the user group is turning out to be a really useful forum for all involved. Clients can avoid repeating each other’s implementation errors, while the supplier gets to grips with the common business challenges their client base is trying to address. It’s a bit of role reversal, but hopefully this form of social networking will lead to ECM 2.0.

Philippe Parker on , , | 10 December 2007

Contented Management

Websites are like cars

Visiting a website is just like driving a car.

Or at least it should be. I’ll try not to labour the analogy.

The other evening I was watching the TV programme about cars, Top Gear. The presenters were looking at how long it took to standardise on three pedals in the same order, gear stick, ignition, etc. No one imposed this standard: Cadillac invented the layout and Austin copied it in the 7, a prodigiously popular car that was copied across the world. Ever since, when you get in a new car, you know how to speed up and slow down, irrespective of make and model.

The experience is of course completely different if you’re on the track in a Ferrari, off road in a Land Rover or commuting in a Nissan Micra. And you always need a moment to get your bearings: adjust the mirrors, find the windscreen wipers, gauge the clutch. This — as you probably figured out — is exactly the same for websites.

You should be able to go to any website and know what to do instantly. The experience will be very different on facebook to John Lewis to Dresdner Kleinwort, but the principles remain the same: people need to be able to perform a task in a way that’s obvious. If they have a great experience achieving the task, so much the better; but don’t put obstacles in their way.

What sort of obstacles do I mean? They’re obvious really…

  • Grouping links that don’t belong together, like Print this page and Find out more.
  • Labeling similar functionality differently across the site: e.g. Go / Submit / Enter buttons on forms.
  • Giving your site a name and brand that’s different to your domain name.
  • Challenging a visitor to say who they are in order to get more information, when the distinction is unclear: e.g. Investors / Public.
  • Delaying people with irrelevant promotions (example).
  • Making things that aren’t links look like links, and vice versa.
  • Making people guess how to get to content, either through poor naming of your navigation or through navigation interfaces that show only some of the options.
  • Putting core functionality in different places on your web pages.
  • Having stuff no one uses: empty forums and wikis, folksonomies that aren’t updated, related links that no one follows.
  • Mimicking browser functionality: to increase font sizes, link back in history, bookmark a page.

All right, so these aren’t web standards, but why would you want to do these things differently to every popular website out there? Do you believe that your users are really so different from those of any other website? What’s wrong with following a conventional layout and stamping your own look and feel on it?

To return to our analogy, if I pick up a hire car and the accelerator is on the left, I’m going to hand the keys straight back at the desk; even if it means trading a Bugatti for a Perouda.

Visitors are only ever going to experience your websites if they actually use them.

Philippe Parker on 7 December 2007

Contented Management

Breaking through to great websites

In the previous post we looked at how Jim Collins’ analysis of companies that made a tangible progression from being good to great put themselves in a position to make those changes possible, and applied this logic to websites. In this post we’re going to look at how to achieve breakthrough in creating great websites once you’ve been through the necessary buildup.

Hedgehog concept
Collins describes at length what he calls a hedgehog, so don’t expect me to plagiarise the concept, just read the book. The main thrust of the concept is that businesses and — I propose — websites must focus on one big thing and be great at it; don’t dip into other peripheral activities. If the core activity is well-founded, this is where you’re going to achieve sustained success, not somewhere else.

How do you define what that one big thing should be? There are three questions you need to ask:

  1. What you can be the best in the world at?
    And conversely, what you cannot be the best in the world at? This is not about a strategy or desire, but about an understanding of where your strengths and opportunities lie.
    I’ve previously criticised clients who declare in their tender documentation that they want to build a world-class website when they don’t have a world-class budget, but I’m reconsidering this position. The web is of course worldwide, so if you’re going to compete, you need to be providing something that your global competitors don’t. Now that may well be a local view: a local commercial service or information specific to a geography. But the salient point is that if the website isn’t attracting its target audience and at least challenging both its online and offline competition, then it’s not doing its job. Moreover, if it isn’t a website you can be proud of, you’re not doing your job.
    The web is still a relatively new economy, with all kinds of business models that are still in their infancy. There’s room for more world-class websites out there and yours should be one of them.
  2. What drives your economic engine?
    In Collins’ world, this question involves a deep understanding of the economic models in your sector. In the web world, it translates to a relatively simple question: What makes your website worth visiting?
    Is it the information you provide, the way you collate information from multiple sources and present in one place, the brand your visitors buy into, a need to participate and engage with like-minded people? You have to be able to identify why the website is important to other people.
  3. What are you deeply passionate about?
    Just as important as ensuring your web presence is important to other people is ensuring that it’s important to you and your organisation. If you’re not interested in producing content for your site, you shouldn’t bother. Just get rid of it. Don’t pad it out.
    Let the website reflect your organisation’s professional integrity. Let it be something where your teams can prove they’re the right people to be setting a vision. Let it reflect the outputs of heated debates you’ve had with your stakeholders about what the website should say about your organisation and how you want to be perceived. Show that you’ve encouraged input and that people believe in what’s on the web. Don’t let your website become straplines and mission statements.

You’ll find the big thing for your website where the answers to these three questions intersect. Put all your effort into this one thing and abandon everything else. Collins suggests having a “stop doing” list.

Culture of discipline
Content management systems were invented to cater for two main problems: providing editors with the means to publish content efficiently without needing to know about web technologies like HTML, and providing a means of controlling the content that is added by those editors, so that it conforms to predefined styles and patterns appropriate to the website.

This rigour is often welcome, allowing you to remain on brand, but you need a degree of entrepreneurship too. What does a site where all the content looks exactly the same say about your organisation? Perhaps that it’s completely process-driven and unlikely to ever dig its way out of a hole…

The system may be able to constrain your editors, but that doesn’t mean that it should. The editorial team should actually understand why those constraints are there: the benefits of consistency, or of an informed approach to information architecture and navigation, of being on-brand. Once they understand and agree with these principles, you won’t need to build systems to enforce standards: the editors will do this for themselves. You’ll be able to de-systematise the constraints as a culture of discipline pervades the way content is produced for the web. If someone then breaks the mould, you’ll know that they’re doing it for a reason, because the mould is too rigid or insufficient for emerging needs.

Just as the project sponsors and stakeholders needed to cast off empire-building and egotism, so the editorial team need to espouse the ideal of a common good. Their professional integrity will translate into a disciplined approach and your website will benefit as a consequence.

Technology accelerators
We haven’t even mentioned technology yet. Cultures rather than systems of discipline may prompt ideas of Enterprise 2.0, wikis and blogs. But Collins tells us that in his team’s analysis of business success, technology was never the primary cause of either success or decline. This is almost certainly true of websites.

So many times you’ll see organisations where the technology tail is wagging the business dog. Someone will tell you that they need a portal, or SOA, or ECM, or the semantic web. Why? What are you trying to achieve? Are you just trying to increase the IT budget?

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with these technologies, indeed they may be the best way of supporting the one big thing you’re trying to achieve. But they are absolutely not an end in themselves. Collins found that in businesses, technology could accelerate momentum, but could not create it. Tellingly, he also found that “Those who turn good into great are motivated by a deep creative urge and inner compulsion for sheer unadulterated excellence for its own sake. Those who build and perpetuate mediocrity, in contrast, are motivated more by the fear of being left behind.”

Only pick technologies that will help you deliver your one big idea. If you don’t need to deliver information in a single place aggregated live from diverse systems, why are you even considering portal technologies? If you don’t need to link documents, email and web content, how will ECM help you achieve your goals?

Conclusion
Good to Great is really based on just two concepts: teamwork and focus. You need to form a team to identify and challenge the problems that your website poses. You then need to focus obsessively on the one thing that is most important for fixing those problems, casting everything else aside. Collins doesn’t tell us that this is easy. But if you can follow his process, you’ll be well on your way to having a really great website.

Philippe Parker on 2 December 2007