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Contented Management

Contented Management

Content type essentials

The concept of content type is so fundamental to CMS that you could argue any system lacking this definition really isn’t a CMS at all: it’s a blogging platform or page builder.

At the most basic level, content types are a classification tool used to distinguish groups of content. Typically, websites will have site sections, news stories, reports, and so on. But this basic classification is handled easily by metadata: just tagging a page as a “news story” and using that tag as a link to other news stories is very straightforward. It’s not really making any use of the content type metaphor.

So what are the benefits of content types?

1. They provide structure.

Larger sites need structure for several reasons: it helps contributors to enter the right kind of information (title, summary, event dates); it helps them to put content into the right areas of the website or intranet; and, it assures consistency in site design across pages that have the same function but different content.

2. They scale the system.

Being able to distinguish between a job, an event and a personal profile is essential if you have a large site with lots of contributors. Content types help with the information architecture of your site for public users and contributors alike; they enable you to introduce navigation that you just would be very difficult achieve without this concept.

3. They enable devolved ownership.

Most websites are “owned” by a marketing or communications team who are keen to ensure house style across the main publication, but who would be happy for other departments to own and maintain their own content that doesn’t require editorial review. If you don’t have content types, it’s a pretty difficult task to set up areas of the site that one department can contribute to without having free reign to change everything, particularly if you want to ensure that public website navigation doesn’t simply reflect your departmental structures. If you have structured content that doesn’t require editorial intervention (press releases, jobs, events, etc.) you can simply assign ownership of these content types to internal teams without compromising the editorial quality of your overall website.

If you’re struggling with findability or devolving ownership of content on your site, there’s a good chance that it’s because you’re lacking the structure to cope with the increasing size and complexity of your site content. Revisiting your defined content types could well be a good place to start.

Philippe Parker on | 21 January 2009

Contented Management

How to get better CMS support

Janus Boye recently proposed that you cancel your maintenance contracts in order to save money. But before you think of this as a great money-spinner, there are a number of key issues you must consider.

  • Many maintenance contracts are tied into the licence agreement; cancel your maintenance and you lose the right to use the software. In this case, the vendor may not sue you, but how honest would you be in denying the company its cash?
  • If something goes seriously wrong with the core product — you discover a security flaw or an issue with the schema — then how do you fix it? Third parties will be extremely reluctant to fix this and any changes to the core product are likely to make re-entering support (when upgrading, for example) extremely complex. We’re talking low likelihood, high impact risks. The question is, do you want to tolerate these or transfer them to someone else?
  • A good relationship with the vendor is still preferable to a poor one. If you take all money and services away, what incentive do they have to provide you with a good service? The analogy shouldn’t be about not paying your insurance premium; it should be about having to return to work with the person you had a regretful fling with at the office Christmas party…

So what can you do to improve your CMS support?

  1. Educate yourself: have procedures to handle common issues (restarting the servers, clearing the cache, etc.). Train internal staff to deal with these and provide procedures to out-of-hours support teams, be they internal or at your hosting company. This will cater for the vast majority of issues that don’t need any further investigation.
  2. Get to the root of the problem. Are you unhappy with your software (or implementation), or simply with your supplier’s responsiveness. If there’s something fundamentally wrong with the product, you should be selecting a new one. If the issue is service or cost then renegotiate the SLA, don’t throw it out.
  3. Find someone who’ll support you better. If the software vendor cannot demonstrate their ability to meet your service level requirements, then ask them to recommend someone who will.
  4. Negotiate your licences so that you get what you pay for. The help desk should be like any additional module that you’d have to purchase with the product. Why should you pay for something you don’t use?

Yes, there’s a downturn and you’re under pressure to save money. But you’re probably under more pressure to ensure that projects and services continue to be delivered. Why would you jeopardize these for the sake of a line item already in next year’s budget?

Focus on developing a good relationship with your supplier and you should find the quality of their service improves too.

Philippe Parker on 15 January 2009

Contented Management

Is taxonomy dead?

An argument about taxonomy has been brewing between two parties who both know what they’re talking about: Theresa Regli at CMS Watch and Patrick Lambe of Organising Knowledge. At the end of last year, CMS Watch proposed that “Taxonomies are dead. Long live metadata!”. As a taxonomist, Patrick Lambe took great umbrage.

I think that byline was a bit facile, but the article does prompt a serious debate about where taxonomy and more particularly expert taxonomists are heading. When organisations think web 2.0, they think wikis, user-generated content and tagging. They don’t think about well-organised content. Web 2.0 implies the death of expert taxonomy rather than the death of taxonomy itself.

People just don’t want taxonomists; they think they can organise content for themselves. While this may be true, it’s unfortunately also true that they just can’t organise content for anyone else. This creates a particular problem for systems which are dependent on finding very specific information: intranets, for example.

If you need your audience to be able to retrieve information reliably, don’t look to “audience development officers“: recognise that taxonomists do have an expertise that you’ll find useful. However, not all information needs to be structured, so feel free to challenge any taxonomist who tells you otherwise.

Philippe Parker on | 14 January 2009