There are a number of blog posts and web pages available that
take various CMS products and compare their features. Some
are focused on the writers specific needs while others try to give
a more general overview. These types of comparisons can be a
very helpful first step in understanding what is out there in the
marketplace for these products.
Unfortunately, it can be too easy to just take these lists,
match them up with your external needs and pick the one that
has the greatest number of green checkmarks. If you do this,
then I would contend that you are making two potentially very
costly mistakes. First, you are treating all needs as equal,
which is a suspect assumption at best. Second, you are not
giving enough consideration to the long-term costs.
Not all features are created equal
It may be tempting to look at your needs and say,
"Ahh, CMS X has a forum and a blog and a control that puts
dancing ballerinas on my pages, all built in. That's exactly
what I need, we'll use them."
This approach may actually decrease your time-to-market since
you won't have to create any of those features yourself or look
into add-ons, so it may look wise at first blush. But before
you commit to a CMS based on external needs, ask yourself these
questions:
- Does the end-user experience on my website matter to me?
- Do I expect to continually need to add content overtime?
- Do I expect to ever need more functionality?
If you answered "Yes" to any of these then you need to look
deeper at what a CMS is really providing you. (And if you
answered "No" to any of these, you should look deeper at whether
your expectations from your site are reasonable. In my
experience #1 should be an automatic "Yes" and #2 and #3 happen
much more often than expected and cause the largest amount of
unplanned costs in a website.)
End-user Experience
It may seem that end-user experience is dependent upon the
design and functionality of your site, and to a degree this is
true. But given that a CMS is the backbone of your site, you
have to take its performance into account. You may have the
best site in the world, in regards to usability and functionality,
but if the backbone is sluggish, your end-users will become
frustrated. This will result in less goal conversions (i.e.
sales or donations, etc...) and thus will affect your business in a
big way. Do you know the typical performance of the CMS you
are considering? Is a quicker time-to-market worth the user
frustration in the end?
Ease of Administration
Let's face it, features are all well and good, but the purpose
of a Content Management System (CMS) is... (prepare to be
shocked)... content management. And when we are dealing with
content management we are usually dealing with an
organization's employees at varying technical skill levels.
In fact, since much content is business driven and not IT driven,
those who would be best at creating the content are often business
users and not technical staff.
Unfortunately, that is often not what happens in the real
world. Often, due to the challenges of working with a CMS,
content management falls to a technical user and not the actual
source of the content, the business specialist. This
increases costs, since technical staff are often a more expensive
resource and maintaining content isn't really the best use of their
time.
Many business have accepted that this is how it works, but it
doesn't have to be. Ease of creating content should be a
large part of your decision for choosing a CMS.
Ease of Functional Change
As much as we try to forecast business needs, no one is
completely prescient. Therefore, one thing we must always
take into consideration in every business decision is the potential
for change. This is especially true in the technology sector
and doubly so for customer facing technologies like a CMS.
Sure you may have needed the dancing ballerinas when you
started, but what if ballerinas go out of style? What if you
need to add Lords-a-leaping or Drummers-drumming? What if, in
fact, you need to do a complete overhaul?
The fact is that changes will come and your ability to adapt
will affect your ability to meet your clients needs in the long
run. Again, since the CMS is the backbone of your externally
facing, client-visible presence, the ability to modify the
functionality is critical. It is imperative to evaluate how
difficult it would be to change something if it became
necessary.
The Cost of Short-Term thinking
The second issue I mentioned way back at the beginning of this
post, was long -term costs. From my experience long-term costs
often overshadow the initial cost of deployment of an IT
product. The less you plan with these long-term needs in
mind, the more this cost disparity will be.
As I hope you can see from my previous points, there are some
features in a CMS that affect long-term costs more than
others. The more difficult a CMS is to work with and modify
and the less user-friendly it is, the larger your long-term costs
will tend to be. The worse the end-user experience the
smaller gain your organization will receive from it. A small
investment in mitigating these concerns will pay huge dividends in
the long run.
So where does that leave us?
As anyone who takes a look at our services and this blog will
soon see, the Umbraco
CMS was the choice for us for all of the reasons stated above
as well as some subjective considerations mentioned in my first
post. We believe it would be a good choice for your
organization as well, which is why we've staked our business on
it.
That said, we understand that some other requirements may take
your organization in a different direction. Regardless
whether Umbraco is your choice for a CMS or not, I ask that you
please take these considerations into account. One of the
reasons Webangelo and this blog exist is to promote thoughtful
decisions in the web and development world. We may one day be
a potential client/constituent of yours and we hope you will make
our experience a pleasant one.