Monday, September 15, 2008

Your Business is Doomed Without Good CMS Web Design

Well, not quite. But deciding what kind of content management system is right for your business can go a long way toward the success or failure of your business. The decision comes down to the answers to these questions: Is the flow of work in your business as productive as it could be? Can your current CM solution expand its capabilities to keep pace with your business as it grows? Consider the following to determine if your current CMS is working for you, or if a change might be in order.

Is your current content management system outdated? There is no question that outdated content management methods can often be more of a hindrance than an asset to productivity. Further, content management systems that cannot match the rate of expansion of the business quickly lead to outdated content, confusion amongst the team members and a lag in the workflow.

Is your system difficult to use? Symptoms of a user-unfriendly system landscape include inconsistent categorization, organization and publishing of content. All of these things can easily frustrate a user and slow down the workflow. That 's counterproductive, and if this is happening to your team, a new or revised CMS may be the answer.

Does your team struggle to produce simple, fast revisions to your content? By their very nature, updates like product information and press releases need to be accurate, timely and valuable. If your team isn't able to keep pace with such updates to your content, investing in a new CMS may be a good idea. Publishing information will be sped up with the availability of tools that will allow subject matter experts to create, edit and publish their content on their own. Your business won't be at the mercy of staff trained in HTML to update the content. With an effective CMS web design software package in place, anyone on staff will be able to create and edit their own content, making it easier to keep the content up-to-date and accurate.

Few things are more fracturing to a team effort than getting road blocked by missing information. It is difficult when you think you have found just what you are looking for only to end up in No Man 's Land. Ineffective CMS web design can cause gaps in and overlaps of information that can really slow down work. A CMS is meant to help with organization, not hinder. A CMS web design solution can ensure that your content is always accurate, thereby keeping the flow of work productive amongst the members of your team.

Successful CMS web design makes it easy for everyone on staff to manage content, regardless of whether they are computer savvy or not. An effective CMS solution can put even your non tech-savvy staff in the driver 's seat because they can create, modify and design content without needing any specialized technical knowledge. The interface should be intuitive. A good CMS helps each cog in the machine to work at optimal productivity. And that leads to increased productivity all around.

A well-designed CMS solution consolidates control of content from an organization-wide "home base," thereby reducing the amount of information overlap, and can identify and assemble content automatically. That means that multiple people can be adding, deleting and editing content all at the same time. A good CMS web design solution will help your team be more collaborative and more productive all at once. That means less time wasted, which translates into more money in your company 's coffers.

If your business is suffering from any of these ailments, you need to re-evaluate your current strategy. Improvements in your CMS can drastically affect the way in which your staff reaches it goals. Through effective CMS web design, your staff can both work collaboratively and individually to get the job done.

In summary, the goals of CMS web design are to consolidate control of your content and make it easy for your staff, regardless of their level of technical computer knowledge, to create and publish their own content. If your information is outdated, difficult to navigate or subject to the isolated control of various sources, your CMS isn't working as well as it could be. It 's time to make a change.

About the Author

Chris Coleman is a Business Analyst at Capita Technologies. Capita Technologies provides CMS web design services for a wide variety of clients.

Article Source: Content for Reprint

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