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9 Best Practices for Implementing a CMS
9/26/2007
As for those who will be administering the software, Merker recommends including funding and resources for keeping them trained at a much higher level and in a sustained way. That includes giving them the time and budget they need to participate in user groups and conferences.
7. Don't assume that your CMS vendor will or should help with the design of your site.
For that, bring in experts who understand the psyche of your students and prospective students--whether that's in house talent, outside consultants, or a combination of both.
"Most effective college websites out there are the ones that really get it," said Merker. "They're constantly moving, constantly updating. Those that get it do a great job, and those that don't have websites that look like they've been around for 10 years and haven't been touched, even though they have."
Where the CMS vendor can come in useful is in showing the CMS administrators how to develop the templates based on those designs.
8. Plan for variety. The use of a CMS doesn't mean the pages on your school's site will all look alike.
There's no cookie cutter approach that works for every college, said Merker. "You can't take somebody else's design and apply it consistently through your design, unless you really do want your college to look exactly like somebody else's."
Likewise, the same is true departmentally. You should expect variations to a theme. Yet, figuring out what how much variation is too much is tricky. Merker cites the case of one West coast client that had seven different colleges. The branding from one college to another was so different, said Merker, "undergraduates were graduating from the institution and going elsewhere to graduate school not even realizing their college offered the program they were looking for."
On the other extreme are schools that have two templates, one for the home page and another for every other page in the site. Ultimately, said Merker, there's a great benefit to having consistency throughout the site, but only as much as is required.
9. You don't have to boil the ocean with a new CMS. Use it to achieve evolutionary change with your site.
Forget about big-bang projects where everything will change on some far-off go-live date. Oftentimes, not only do those projects never meet their deadlines, but the participants become so frustrated, they abandon the work midway through.
A smarter approach, advised Merker, is to take CMS work at a slower pace. Rather than redesigning the website, simply evolve it, perhaps department by department. Consider training users and administrators enough to bring in a usable form of the website and migrate it piecemeal into the content system. "Ultimately we need to fix the core problem," said Merker, "which is to make the content reasonably up to date and effective for whoever the audience might be."
Dian Schaffhauser is a writer who covers technology and business. Send your higher education technology news to her at dian@dischaffhauser.com.
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