I get a lot of questions asked while talking to prospective clients and other web designers on content management systems and which is best. First, for those unfamiliar with content management systems (CMS); a CMS enables website owners to update their website (in varying degrees) themselves. The upside in the customer’s view is that it will take less time for changes and also save money if they can do it themselves.
A Content Management System Will Be A Mistake For Most of Your Clients!
But How? Simple…Your client is not a web designer. There are many details that go into a successful website. Let’s list them.
- Design
- Text
- Usability
- Images
- Search Engine Optimization
- Support
If you miss any one of these items, the website has a good chance of not meeting the clients expectations and making you look like you sold them a sub-par product. Not what anyone wants. The thing with clients handling their own website is that they will, in most cases, miss most if not all of these necessary pieces.
ANALOGY WARNING! Let’s say you’ve decided to go into the restaurant business even though you have zero restaurant or culinary experience. You hire a company to build you a turn-key restaurant. They build you a building, stock it with the usual restaurant fixtures, stock the kitchen with equipment, fill the walk-ins with food, give you a day of training on how to cook and then flip the sign from Closed to Open. How long do you think your restaurant will be in business? What do you know about marketing your restaurant…or hiring qualified staff…or overall everyday restaurant operation? Most would fail and a good portion of the rest would never reach their full potential. ANALOGY WARNING END!
So let’s look at our list from above.
1. Design
I think we can all agree that the overall design of the website is important. The look and feel of the website should reflect not only the type of business but the individual business owner as well. Maybe something quirky for an unusual business owner would work better then the usual straight forward type design. One reason I don’t agree with having complete strangers critique designs. They don’t know the client, the clients targeted customers, the scope of the project. The Pitfall: the client is probably not a designer. They don’t understand colors and how they work together, just as the restaurant owner from above wouldn’t probably realize that garlic, olive oil, and basil are an awesome flavor combination.
2. Text
Text should be simple enough for a client to handle. The Pitfall: the client doesn’t understand text and how it draws visitors to take action. The client is probably not familiar with what text is important to users or worse, they have horrible spelling or grammar. I’ve seen clients add text that is a font, size, and color that doesn’t fit in with the overall design. Talk about looking bad. What are the users going to think if they see something like this???????
Funny thing is, I’ve seen this exact thing and worse from a client with a CMS. The simple truth is they just don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong.
3. Usability
As a web designer we know the importance of having a website that’s easy for visitors to use. We lay things out in a way that makes sense. We do our best to avoid visitors getting lost or confused on which way to go within the website. If a website is hard for visitors to use, they won’t use it. The Pitfall: clients have no experience in usability practices. They probably have never even heard of the word. How successful will the website be if it’s hard to use? Have you ever gotten lost? Were you frustrated? Is this going to help the client who just doesn’t know any better?
4. Images
We work hard to do our best using Photoshop and have crisp, clean images that help tell a story. The overall look of a website can be greatly impacted by the quality of the images. The Pitfall: 300 dpi 1000px wide X 900px high in a spot that requires a 72 dpi 150 X 90 image. We’ve all seen it. An image that constrained to a different size that’s blurry, pixelated and just plain looks horrible. How about images from the clients digital camera that has a time stamp or other undesirable background element that the client wouldn’t even think about? You’re great design is looking worse with every image added and leaving a bad impression on visitors.
5. Search Engine Optimization
One thing every client has in common is that they expect their website to do well in the search engines. We do keyword analysis, create pages that offer the best SEO potential, make sure the keyword density is correct, still no guarantees. SEO must be monitored, tested, and tweaked. The Pitfall: the client doesn’t contain this knowledge. If their website doesn’t do well in the search engines, you’ll be the one to blame. Simple as that. The client may have the coolest website in the world, but if it doesn’t get found, it doesn’t exist. Way too critical to just dump into the hands of most clients.
6. Support
Don’t forget about support. If you build their website in a CMS and their server platform upgrades causing errors on the site, they’ll be calling you to fix it. This next scenario is one I’ve seen most of the time. The site is launched and you’ve trained them on using the CMS. No problem. They don’t make any changes for a year or more and completely forget their login info, let alone how to use the interface. Or, the person you’ve trained leaves and nobody there knows how to update the site. All of these things happen more times than you’d think. You must be prepared to handle this and reach an agreement on how to charge for this when these issues arise.
Clients don’t think of the above issues and it’s your job to make them aware of all of the pitfalls of running their own website. Clients need to understand the trade-offs of saving a few bucks by doing their own website maintenance and how much business it could potentially cost them. As web designers, it’s important we understand if what we are selling the client is really going to help them and in turn help us in our relationship with the client. Evaluate each client that wants a CMS to see if they have the talent and manpower to handle the task, give them the info and make the decision together.
Mike: As someone who has administered a couple different Web CMSs since about 2002, I agree with you. A CMS will only deliver on the promise of “let the client make their own updates” IF that client already possesses the human resources to do Web editing.
In my experience, a CMS is a great way to modularize, standardize and manage a site or set of sites — all benefits… if you’re a Web professional! For non-Web pros, a CMS most often represents additional duties for which they are unprepared, either in time or training and usually both.
I like your analogy of the restaurant. Sorry, but I’ll be stealing that in the future!
To precariously extend that analogy, most of the food in the walk-in will go past its expiration date before anyone gets around to taking it out and putting new food in. It will start to freezer-burn and smell. It seems that about 90% of our CMS “content contributors” never get around to contributing any new content, ever. They weren’t hired as Web editors, and a day or two of CMS training won’t convince them that suddenly, they have magically become Web editors. And they certainly won’t magically gain the Web editing work-hours beyond their other duties.
You mentioned text, and for sure it seems no matter what strictures are put on CMS users, they WILL find a way to supersize their fonts, blast their text with red and bold and underline, and they’d it too if they could! What they WILL NOT do is suddenly become better writers.
Even if CMS users do add content, the chances of those users being good writers, let alone good Web writers, are small. After all the well-written print brochures have been transcribed onto Web pages, someone needs to come along and keep it fresh. And if it’s poorly written, it ain’t fresh.
I think it’s often overlooked that many Web editors are good writers. The Web remains primarily a verbal communication medium, after all.
…and they’d blink it too if they could…
I agree that most of the CMS systems out their give way too much control to the business user. That said, their are many CMS’s that allow the designer to lock down the design and act more like website editing tools then full blown CMS’s systems – like Konductor for example. Clients will ask to do more and more of their own updates – that will only increase – we just need to start using better systems. My 2 cents.