What sort of editorial model do you follow for your web content management? Do you try to get as many as possible hands-on, or do you run everything through a centralised editorial team?

It’s ironic that WCMS which enable you to perform more advanced content management provide tools that you probably won’t want to devolve to part-time editorial teams. Conversely, simpler WCMS are often chosen by by smaller, centralised teams who often feel constrained by the software they use.

Vignette, for example, enables you to assign content to various taxonomies through folders, projects and channels, so that content can be cross-referenced extensively across your site. Put these taxonomies in the hands of people who don’t understand them and you’ll create convoluted user journeys: the exact opposite of your content management objectives.

Alterian’s corporate offering meanwhile — once known as Immediacy — provides pretty basic content management. Most users should be able to get their head around its tools pretty easily. But if you want to create more complex content relationships or have content fragments re-used across your sites, you’re better off with Alterian’s enterprise product, known as Morello. Devolving editorial responsibilities to part-timers who don’t fully understand the consequences of updating content that’s used in lots of places in your websites is decidedly risky, however.

In larger organisations, lots of people will produce content for the web sporadically. These people will change, have variable knowledge of the software and writing style guides, and limited understanding of your website. The last thing they need is a piece of software that allows them to break stuff because they just don’t get it.

So, do you:

1. select a simple WCM for devolved teams to create pages in predefined templates; or
2. select a complex WCM that enables you to perform more advanced content management tasks, but centralise the editorial process.

The more you want to cross-reference and re-use content across your sites, the greater your need for an advanced tool and an expert team to manage it. But if you want to devolve authorship, you’ll need to keep content management tasks and software as simple as possible. Don’t try to industrialise content production by providing everyone with more machinery. For broader participation you need to provide hand tools. Leave the combined harvester in the hands of experts.