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Contented Management

Contented Management

Crystal balls are there to be broken

Guy Westlake, a senior product marketing manager at Vignette, has gazed into his crystal ball for trends and technologies in 2009. This is certainly worth a read, as Vignette continue to have some excellent product features and are one of the driving forces in both WCM and portal software development.

Of course there’s an element here of Vignette promoting its own product set — a case of gazing at navels rather than crystal balls? — but I hope Guy won’t mind if that I contradict some of his predictions. I do agree with quite a few!

1. Enterprise 2.0 takes off

The use of web 2.0-style tools (micro-blogging, RSS, tagging, etc.) as part of daily communication within a business should be a no-brainer, but many organisational cultures are way behind the curve. Early adopters are reaping the rewards of improved knowledge sharing, but the ethos of control, hierarchy and compliance hamper efforts to implement Enterprise 2.0. How do you convince people who send email attachments to half a dozen people for approval that there’s a better way of communicating if they can’t see beyond their clogged up inboxes?

One compelling case for web 2.0 tools is their use in project management: posting on project status with comments for feedback, using shared calendars and discussion boards for meetings, building networks of friends across departmental and organisational boundaries. But if you’re used to out-of-the-box services, be prepared! Implementing these kind of tools within the firewall is often considerably more complex: LDAP integration is just the first hurdle you’re likely to face.

2. Life in the cloud

So many cloud-based applications offer real benefits at seemingly ever-falling costs that the cloud appears to be the saviour of the web, particularly when recession hangs over IT budgets. But security questions remain: how sure can you be that information you want to keep in your organisation remains there? Businesses will have to become a lot more savvy about encryption methods before they start to really take advantage of what the cloud has to offer.

Nevertheless, those applications that are external to the firewall — including email — are ripe for cloud computing and I expect we’ll see many organisations taking “a punt” on these services just from a cost perspective.
3. Web 2.0 in the financial services sector

This is a banking compliance officer’s worst nightmare: anyone posting all kinds of comments to a bank’s public website. However, financial services have been the trail-blazers for web 2.0 on internal applications and I think we’ll see them pushing these applications to the public too.

The question is: what is the killer app? Social comparison sites for mortgages, savings and the like similar to Trip Advisor in the holiday industry are bound to become more prominent. But retaill banking is going to have to think long and hard about applications that they can find for online social media to gain market penetration.

4. Personalisation and the rise of ‘My Web’

Personalisation has not been the trend for web content and I see no evidence that it will become one. Personalisation has proven many times to be both costly and ineffective. The trend has been and will continue to be “our web” rather than “mine”.

Even the oft-cited Amazon example isn’t enclosing the individual in their own world: it’s making recommendations based on what other people bought who bought the same product and there’s a heavy use of communal rating functionality. I expect we’ll see more in the way of sites suggesting links other people followed (even Google is moving this way) rather than offering visitors options to configure the kind of content they want to see.

5. The future of online media is video

This is a marketeer’s dream. Unfortunately, the market is willing but not yet ready. There are significant challenges in engaging users with video based on current browsing habits. If you’re online at work, watching video is still viewed as at best anti-social and at worst as skiving. Watching at home still isn’t the experience that it should be, sat a few inches away from a small monitor displaying an even smaller video. Video on mobile devices is improving significantly however, so if mobile bandwidth prices start to fall, expect to see a rise in video clips for handheld devices. What’s more, these devices are likely to be far less effective at blocking out this content than most PC browsers.

6. The integrated brand experience

There’s is a slightly chicken and egg situation going on with multi-channel delivery. Sites won’t develop for small audience shares and those audiences won’t visit sites that don’t cater for them. I expect that we’ll see a few niche players here — probably around news and software sites for mobile devices — before we see any real obvious example (in Europe, at least) of business catering for multiple channels.

7. Social media – what next?

Social media has been about individual sites allowing lots of people to comment and contribute. The next step (we’re already seeing on many sites including BBC news) is for the site themselves to be social and provide links to resources they don’t control. I think this is a really good thing. For too long, organisations have focussed on enclosing themselves in their own “enterprise” models rather than seeing themselves as part of the web. Now they’ll begin sharing content and resources with each other more freely in order to become the “hub” that visitors come to on a regular basis. It’s best to be the daily starting point for browsing rather than the infrequent end point.
8. Semantic Web

Has the semantic web lost all meaning? It’s pushed so heavily by vendors, but how many compelling examples are there of it? Some of the technology is exciting, but let’s see a compelling business proposition for it.

Tidying up your content, organising it better and making it more search-friendly are still more effective ways of improving your website or intranet than the implementation of a semantic engine.

If the crystal ball isn’t right, what is?

I’m not disagreeing out of hand with Guy (apart from on personalisation and possibly the semantic web), but if I disbelieve his predictions, what do my own tarot cards propose?

1. There will be more opportunities to reach new audiences across multiple channels, but a correspondingly increased need to justify the costs of these new channels.

2. Intranet projects will struggle for attention. Challenges and costs associated with application integration in comparison to a cloud-based model will cause many internal implementations to be delayed. The focus will turn instead to communication beyond the firewall for market penetration and retention.

3. Websites will become social, sharing content not just from their own resources but from off-brand and off-message sites too, through the increased use of RSS.

Let’s review next year and see whether tarot is more effective than a crystal ball.

Philippe Parker on , | 19 December 2008

Contented Management

When search is a good way to navigate

If your site has thousands of pages of content that you’re struggling to organise, it’s pretty tempting to scrap your CMS-driven navigation structures and just provide your visitors with a search-driven interface instead. You can achieve this in two ways.

Firstly, by providing a simple search box. After all, this is the way most people find new information through Google. Secondly, by using a search tool to push similar content to users; for example the right-hand column of this page provides links to pages that are classified under different themes. But before you view search as some kind of panacea for all your information architecture woes, let’s pause to reconsider these two methods.

In the first case, how do you know that the search results presented by Google are the most relevant pages to your query? Google has no real benchmark. Then weigh up how much effort people put into ensuring their content is optimised to appear at the top of the search results and then ask yourself what you’d have to do to ensure that relevant content for every search a user undertakes.

In the second case, consider that actually I’ve already (very loosely) made decisions about navigation by tagging every post. This is almost the same effort as organising the content into folder structures as you would in a CMS. In fact, for sites with lots of content it can be more difficult to tag all the content than to drop it into a folder structure; the folders provide a more complete classification metaphor that’s easier for people with less expert knowledge to implement.
So how do you decide when search is better for navigation than in a CMS? Here are my suggested criteria:

  1. You have the money.
    Implementing faceted search technologies can be significantly more expensive than using standard content management system functionality. Day rates for leading product professional services are often relatively high, there are licence costs and there’s an additional cost of integration, particularly if you need to tie a security model into the search tool.
  2. You have few content types.
    But you have lots of content. Structured navigation from search works well where you have similar kinds of content, with similar structures against which the search engine can execute straightforward queries. A product catalogue is an obvious example. The tool can filter on price, format, location, etc. which have definitive and distinct values.
  3. Your content is distinct.
    Categories need to be unique; semantic tools aren’t really advanced enough yet to tell you that apple is a fruit not an iPhone when displayed with orange unless orange is the network provider. Moreover, your pages need to be called something readily identifiable. If you have ten pages called “Help” or “Contact Us”, how will the search tool know which is the relevant resource for the site visitor?
  4. Linking is obvious.
    If you use search to provide your navigation, you relinquish editorial control, so it must be clear why pages in the navigation are related. On a medical site, for example, you might link to other conditions treated with the same drug. However, as soon as you’re trying to tell people something you can get in trouble if you automate. An example I often use is a page about health advice for eggs: should this link to information about required protein intake (i.e. eggs are good for you) or about cholesterol (i.e. eggs are bad for you)? Or should you exercise some editorial discretion and explain about balanced diets? There are few search engines that could perform the navigation required to achieve the latter example.

Practically, it’s generally simpler to use CMS to navigate, with a search option to help people who are stuck. The advantage of CMS-driven navigation is that the editorial control you can exercise should help you to push visitors to your site along a route you want them to take. However, if you’re happy to let your intrepid visitors explore your content, and you’ve nothing in particular you want to promote to them, then search engines can be a viable means to provide navigation.

My final analogy is that CMS-driven navigation is like a library, while search-driven navigation is more like a bookstore. In a library you’ve preplanned how visitors can find specific information. In a bookstore you’re encouraging them to browse, but they may never find what they came in for.

Philippe Parker on | 15 December 2008

Contented Management

Shortlisting your CMS

Having asked yourself what problems your content management system should address, you reach the stage in the selection exercise where you can shortlist some products. This does NOT mean going to Gartner, Butler or Forrester and picking whatever’s in the magic quadrant. That is a recipe for expensive mistakes.

There will be a lot of software on the market that can help to overcome your problems. You can whittle these down by placing other constraints on your selection process.

Due diligence: have you involved the right people?

Your project will need buy-in from various stakeholders. If you haven’t got their buy-in by the time you shortlist products, you’ll be facing all kinds of political issues even if you pick exactly the right tool. But you need input from all the relevant parties. What benefit do you get from excluding people in communications or marketing, hands-on content editors, technical support and development (whether these are in-house or a trusted service provider), the people in charge of your IT strategy, and of course, procurement. Not only do all these parties have a stake in the selection process; they’ll be able to contribute something constructive too.

How long will you keep the technology for?

Clearly your shouldn’t be looking to keep the technology for longer than the duration of your web or content strategy. If you’re planning to keep something for longer than you know what you’re going to do with it, you’ll probably get into a mess. So, if you have a clear strategy, you’ll want a product with a roadmap to match. If you’re just trying to satisfy short-term goals, you’ll probably want something that’s easy to deploy rather than highly extensible. Having an awareness of how long you’ll want to keep the software for will also help to inform your business case.

Do you really need just a single content management system?

Firstly, you need to understand the limitations of a CMS; it won’t do everything you need. You may need an additional search engine, it won’t satisfy eCommerce requirements, it probably won’t allow much in the way of personalisation, forms created in it will be pretty limited, it’s unlikely to stream live audio or video… these are all best served by distinct applications (which can mean a difficult integration project). So manage your stakeholders’ expectations and constrain your project objectives.

Now consider whether a single CMS is right for your organisations. Are different departments contributing to the CMS likely to need to share content or code? Or could they each have their own devolved system with a common interface for delivery, such as a portal? Will there be licencing or training cost benefits from a having a single CMS?

Work out your budget

Figure out what you can afford, then build your business case. As a rule of thumb, in order to get something workable and fully tested, you’ll need to spend upwards of 75% of your budget on services as opposed to software and database licences. This is likely to cross a whole range of software off your long-list right away.

Baseline your technology

Why does your CMS need to be Java or .Net? Is this your existing in-house skill set? If not, do you really want to invest in re-training? If you have no in-house team, do you really care what technology the CMS is built in? Shouldn’t it just be the cheapest available? Java and .Net are useful if you know you’re going to have a number of integration exercises with applications in those technologies. Otherwise your technological prerequisites may be a costly red herring.

Invite both software vendors and integration partners together

Encourage all participants to do pitch together. In my experience, no web CMS vendor has sufficient in-house experience to address all the services issues in a web project: information architecture, interface design, even systems integration. Conversely, the only services companies you’ll find who know a product inside out will be those who have ex-employees from the vendor. And even then, these developers won’t know the product roadmap or the best practice that the software supplier has gleaned from its many clients over the years. Get them together and have a happy menage-à-trois.

You now have your requirements and your constraints. You should be in a better positioni to shortlist suppliers. If you don’t know where to start in drawing up this list, you can contact us.

Philippe Parker on 12 December 2008

Contented Management

Basics of organising web content

There are a bewildering array of resources available on information architecture, user experience and interface design, so I just wanted to make a very quick post on how to approach the organisation of your web content.

  1. Identify key user types (personas)
  2. Identify key tasks they need to undertake (user journeys)
  3. Develop navigation to enable journeys (site maps)
  4. Develop user interface that will enable users to complete journeys (wire-frames)

Main advantages of doing things this way:

  • You’re not trying to fit in existing content unless it’s actually useful to your users.
  • You can identify content that’s missing easily.

There are more useful IA definitions at iaonesheeters.com

Philippe Parker on , , | 11 December 2008

Contented Management

Frequently Asked Questions

Why would you put FAQs on a website?

To be able to tell people that FAQ content is available on your site.

Who do FAQs help?

Only the person who needs to claim that the content is on the site.

Why don’t FAQs help visitors to your site?

Because visitors to your site don’t care whether their question has been asked by anyone else or not. All they want to do is accomplish a task.

But my FAQs are representative of what all visitors are asking, so don’t they bring value?

Think of it another way. Your site is providing a user manual for your services. By providing FAQs you’re offering them that user manual without a contents page. Is that helpful?

But isn’t it helpful to provide what most people want first?

Of course, but if I don’t want the most obvious answers, I’ll give up and go to another provider: either through a competitor website or I’ll pick up the telephone and harass your call centre. That probably defeats the purpose of your website.

Why is browsing FAQs a flawed argument?

Let’s say you’re describing your arrangements for dealing with business partners. If I want to become a partner, I should follow links to Partners > Becoming our partner. Why would I trawl through a long list of questions in order to find the right one. I want a simple and obvious path to the information I need.

Why can’t visitors just search the FAQs?

They’ll probably do this if you offer no other way to the information. But the success of their searches will depend on how well and how consistently you classify the questions and on having a really good search engine that will pull out relevant information.

Isn’t it easy to manage FAQs?

It might be easy to add an FAQ, but it’s extremely difficult to manage them. You’ll need to check that similar content doesn’t already exist, just framed with a different question. You’ll need to check that you’re removing questions that are obsolete, or simply not being asked any more. And you’ll need to ensure that questions are presented in the right order according to your site visitors’ behaviour.

So is there anything good about FAQs?

Not in their standard format of unsorted lists of questions and short answers.

So what should I do?

Review what people are contacting you about over other channels. This information should probably be on your website. Does it exist already? If it exists, is it being adequately promoted? Undertake some usability studies challenging people to find the information. What do you learn about your site navigation from this? If the content is prominent, is it well-written? Are people finding the content and misunderstanding it?

Isn’t this post just stating the obvious?

Yes, but it’s amazing how many people think their website needs FAQs but they never ask themselves why.

Philippe Parker on , | 5 December 2008

Contented Management

Questions to ask before selecting a web content management system

This is a brain dump of open questions that I’ve asked previously when speaking to clients about their websites and their requirements for a content management system. This assumes that the technical prerequisites are being addressed elsewhere.

You can pix and mix these questions as you feel are appropriate to your context, but generally it takes about an hour to get through these with one or two people at a time. If you need to run larger workshops, I don’t think this approach would work.

Vision and Objectives

  • Is there a content strategy?
  • What goals are currently being met?
  • How do you want to interact with your customers?
  • How much integration is required with other systems?
  • Which services should be provided through the website?
  • What is “the Vision” from your team’s perspective?

Suppliers

  • Who is creating / editing content? With what frequency?
  • Who plans content?
  • Where / what is the content you are responsible for and how is it used?
  • Who do you work with during the content creation process? How effective are these relationships?
  • How do you collect information to write your content?
  • Do you usually know about other initiatives in the organisation and how they affect what you’re working on?
  • Do other departments see the documents you produce? Do you see theirs?
  • How do you handle authors working on content that may be published simultaneously to different parts of the site? (i.e. ensure content is the same when it needs to be and different when it needs to be).

Inputs

  • What are your current content creation processes? Which are effective / ineffective? Why?
  • What are the problems / frustrations you face in creating content?
  • What features would you like to see in an authoring, CMS or publishing tool?
  • How are documents created? Do you use or templates or style sheets?
  • What tools do you use in authoring? How effective are they?
  • What is the format of the content you create? What sources is it dependent on?
  • How do you add metadata?
  • Do you re-use content from elsewhere on the site?
  • How do you manage demand for content from customers?

Process

  • What do you do to control documents? Version / access controls?
  • How do you handle sign-off / review?
  • Who edits / transforms content?
  • How is it classified?
  • Who relates content across the site?
  • What workflow review is involved?
  • How will the content be reused / archived / reviewed?
  • What works well with the current process?
  • What are we trying to improve?
  • What sort of reporting is required?

Outputs

  • What format does the content need to be in? (Accessibility levels, email, print / DTP, mobile, .CSV)
  • Where is it stored / distributed / aggregated?
  • What templates are required?
  • How much content should be reusable?
  • What extra site functionality are you interested in seeing?
  • How much Interaction or interoperability is required with other sites (e.g. client extranets)?
  • What requirements do you have for searching?

Customers

  • Who do you consider your target audience?
  • How much interaction do you have with customers (feedback, surveys, consultations)?
  • Is there a need for personalised / targeted outputs?
  • What are your customers’ key areas of interest?
  • Do you have access to website statistics? How do you respond to these?
  • What attracts customers to the store?
  • What information on the site helps your customers get their job done?
  • What types of information do they look for in a document?
  • How much information do they find useful?
  • When do they use the content (on one-off projects or on a recurring basis?)
  • What do they like best about the content? What do you like least?
  • How do your customers prefer to receive information?
Philippe Parker on 2 December 2008