To help you get started with the process of evaluating content management systems and identifying the right fit, here’s a quick overview of some of the popular options, organized by ideal use scenario. Taking a hard look at your reasons for producing content will help you develop the best strategy to meet your goals. Official websites use .gov If you’re making any design changes along with your content migration, do user testing early-on, to gather feedback and make improvements before launch. It’s 4:00 and you suddenly realize that tomorrow is National Coffee Day and you have NOTHING prepared to celebrate for your … Review your content types, so they can help you migrate the content into a structured format. Enterprise content management (ECM) and web content management (WCM) are common functions of a CMS. The key steps in getting ready to move to a CMS include: A content strategy defines such things as topics, themes and purpose, and can also play a part in website governance, customer experience, metadata and search engine optimization (SEO). Enables content aggregation, re-use, and syndication via Really Simple Syndication (RSS), Provides an audit trail, with information about who created the information, and when, Helps identify redundant, duplicative, and possibly obsolete content, Because a CMS typically has an interface similar to a word processing program, you don’t need to know markup language to add or edit content, Design templates can ensure that the “look and feel” of your site remains consistent, You can give contributors controlled access to the system, so some people can create, but not publish, while others have full control to create, publish, or delete content, You can build forms to collect content and metadata elements in a structured, organized way, Commercial products generally require a potentially significant up-front investment to purchase the software and user licenses. Does it support well-defined roles and permissions, so only certain people can perform tasks such as publishing or deleting content? As an example, as part of EPA’s migration to a new CMS, they identified their content structure and can now tag each piece of content with metadata as it’s created in the new CMS. Test out your migration process (especially if you’ve automated anything) in a sandbox or testbed. How easy is it to find your content within the system? Your migration will be simpler if you don’t make any content changes as you’re actually migrating content to the new CMS. While it’s easy to focus solely on all the technical details, no content management system will work without support from the right people. To get you started, we’ve developed a sample content inventory spreadsheet sample content inventory spreadsheet which you can use to document your content inventory. There are five key areas to explore: Know Yourself: Begin by determining your organization’s motives for content management and what you hope to gain. Improving the federal government’s ability to deliver digital information anytime, anywhere, on any device—via open content—is a key goal of the Digital Government Strategy.A content management system (CMS) can help your agency move to an open content model, making it easier for people to find, share, use, and re-use your information.. For example, someone that was routinely cc’d on new content on a “nice to know” basis might not be too thrilled to find out they will be a required approver who needs to review content ASAP to avoid holding up the process. Make sure you have backed up your site, and coordinate with your IT shop to test the backup, to make sure it works and can be restored if needed. Content management is the processes that organize content throughout the creation, publication, and archiving lifecycle. The spreadsheet has two tabs: one for active content, and one to track content that you’ve archived or unpublished. Open-source systems can incur potentially significant development costs to maintain over time and take full advantage of customizable features. All Rights Reserved Smartsheet Inc. What Is the Definition of Content Management? Web teams and CIO shops should discuss options for Web hosting. The last module is pivotal for Content Strategists. Perform a “before and after comparison” to document improved efficiencies and help you measure success. You’ll need to validate that each piece of content was correctly migrated. Good for Small Websites: These free and low cost systems should have all the bells and whistles smaller organizations and websites will need. Many federal agencies already use open-source content management systems, and if you’re considering it for your agency, GSA offers a secure and compliant self-service content management platform, sites.USA.gov, built on WordPress and available for all federal agencies as a shared service. Read more about creating open content and National Public Radio (NPR)’s Create Once, Publish Everywhere strategy. The momentum is high and everyone is still … Are you posting content once and repurposing it, or publishing the same content several times, in different ways? Two sites that have successfully implemented responsive design are USA.gov and AIDS.gov. Additional information about the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) can be found at https://www.gsa.gov/about. 6. Here are 10 steps you can take to build a winning content strategy in 2018 and beyond. If you’re a small business, you can gain a lot from using CMS technology to create and manage content without much technical know-how or a hefty budget. Can you adapt your content workflow to the new system? Choosing the right content management system for your business can literally make or break your digital presence and content strategy. Tools you may find useful to develop your content inventory include: Once you’ve built it, you should continue to update and maintain it, tracking all changes you make to your site as you add or remove content. A content management system is a software that houses all of that back-end coding for your website and provides you with an easy-to-navigate interface where you can add text, images, video, and more. The answer to this question isn’t as simple as it might seem: In fact, in his book, The Content Management Bible, expert Bob Boiko spends several chapters discussing this topic. Today, content is often focused on the digital environment, and any company that has a website is considered to be in the content business. Many agencies use a combination of commercial and open-source tools to meet different publishing needs. There are a lot of great benefits to content management systems, but if you don’t implement them properly or choose the wrong system, there can definitely be negatives as well. Look for pages with similar content, and review to see if you can combine them and delete one of the pages. Defining Your Content Management System Strategy. You may use a mix of manual work and automated tools, if you are only able to automate parts of your migration, and have to manually move the rest of your content into the new system. It allows anyone, even those without a formal technical background, to place content on a website and keep track of it with ease. It also: When tagging content, you should generally use established industry-standard vocabularies, such as Dublin Core, which define common elements and enable aggregation of common pieces of information from several different sources. You may also want to include all linked files and attachments such as PDFs, video files, documents, pictures, etc. Note that a content management system is different from a content management framework, although they can allow you to do many of the same things. Earlier, we touched briefly on knowing your buyer persona—who exactly you are targeting. Even people who may not ever use the system directly might benefit from a training so they can understand the new processes their team will be following. The amount of time needed for a manual migration depends on the complexity of the site and the number of people doing the work. It shares common ground with user experience (UX), interface design, web development, SEO, content marketing, public relations and traditional “offline” marketing. This will give you a chance to test your migration process, and also gather customer feedback on the new site, if you’ve made any design enhancements. Features can vary amongst the various CMS offerings, but the core functions are often considered to be indexing, search and retrieval, format management, revision control and publishing. A content management system (CMS) is a software application used for producing and managing a website. Work with your Contracting Office to execute an SOO/SOW. With a CMS in place, you can spend less time staring at your computer screen and more time doing business. At a minimum, include all your Web pages. View the same site on your mobile device, and you can see that top task content is presented prominently, in an easy-to-read format that’s been optimized for smaller screens. Whether you use an all-in-one system or a combination of different tools and processes, there are seven typical components to content management: In order to succeed at content management, you need to develop a content management strategy: a set of guiding principles and goals for what you want to achieve with content management. In order to create a content management strategy, you need to focus on your needs and resources. Throughout her book, Content Strategy for the Web, Kristina Halvorson discusses in detail the benefits of and how to create your content strategy. The familiar Smartsheet interface is designed for how people actually work, and leads to rapid and broad adoption across your organization. Here’s what all of this involves: Now that you have an overall understanding of how content management systems work, let’s take a closer look at the features and capabilities that are essential to support those key components. Soon to be by Smartsheet. Identify Your Audience. If a topic or page has low search traffic, and low visits, review to see if it’s a candidate for removal. It will help you see all your content at a glance, and illustrate how the different sections of your site fit together. There are fields for the page name, URL, date, review schedule, content lead, and more. Is your most important content placing well in search results? Create open structured content by identifying such things as content types and taxonomies. Are admin functions, such as adding a new user, intuitive? LockA locked padlock It also gives you and your team a quick reference when questions come up. Staffing—do you have enough people available to migrate content quickly, and review content to make sure it’s complete and correct in the new CMS? Metadata is essentially “data about data,” and consists of machine-readable descriptions that tell other computers important facts about your digital content. If you choose an open-source CMS, urge your team to actively participate in user community forums. Building your website with a CMS is a great way to streamline workflows and ensure that your team can easily manage your site’s content. A phased approach with incremental improvements may be a lot more effective than a “big bang,” as it will allow your company to extend their investment over time and also give the team a chance to gradually adjust to some major changes. Here are some examples of both a very basic project outline, and a detailed project plan: Do you have sufficient resources to successfully pull off a migration? Both are important to improve search results and make your information easier to find and re-use. A Content Management System can support your content marketing strategy by simplifying and consolidating the great volumes of content. So track the volume of calls your help desk or service area receives. A content management system (CMS) is software designed to create, edit, organize and publish digital content. Whether it’s your website, ad campaigns, partner communication or anywhere in between, the ability to grant permissions and share CDN links is essential to maintaining a consistent brand experience by efficiently managing the content it’s made from. In a manual migration, content is manually copied and pasted from the old system to the new. You may find that a commercial tool is the best choice to manage your website, and an open-source tool is the best fit for your blog. Identify your project manager, and empower that person to make decisions and assign work. There are many stakeholders who might not be too enthusiastic about adopting a new system: people who aren’t tech savvy and are afraid of learning a new system; “gatekeepers” who are afraid of losing control; and creative thinkers who don’t want to adhere to any standards or style guides. With the help of XML-based DITA standard, a component content management system supports content reuse by helping you build chunks of content and images, and storing that content in … Is the tool designed to support the size and type of website you have? This will help you to identify the one that will work best for you. A content management system (CMS) can help your agency move to an open content model, making it easier for people to find, share, use, and re-use your information. Many of these systems combine the basic components of content management into a single software platform, which means they allow you to manage and store content across its entire lifecycle, enable multiple contributors to play their various role, maintain editorial, design, and quality standards through set templates and levels of review, and provide version control management. Your completed content inventory can help you spot the ROT. Technical resources—do you have the skills to configure the new CMS, write scripts for the migration, etc.? A content management system is a software application that allows for simplified creation and modification of web content. But that same approach may not work as well when it comes to implementation — especially if, like most companies, you have limited resources and tight timeframes. The size and complexity of your site will determine whether or not you can automate certain migration tasks. Good for Social: While some web content management tools may claim they offer social capabilities, the reality is that most social media managers will want to use a dedicated platform that’s designed for social. Content management systems come in many flavors, from proprietary, commercial tools with all the bells and whistles, to home-grown systems developed in-house, to open-source tools with a community of dedicated developers working to continually improve the product. You may need to work with your CIO staff or developer to configure your CMS to collect metadata. In simpler language, a content management system is a tool that helps you build a website without needing to write all the code from scratch (or even know how to code at all). Once you determine the data structure for your content, you can configure your CMS so it’s easy to create and tag content accordingly. It reiterates that your strategy helps you to identify what already exists, what should be created and, more importantly, why it should be created. Structured content refers to content that is posted as “pieces of information” (vs. “pages”) and tagged with keywords and metadata so it can be aggregated, organized, shared, and reused. If unexpected delays occur, let people know what’s happening, and how it will impact them, to mitigate any problems. If you view each of these sites on your PC, you can see all the content available on the homepage, optimized for a large screen. Identify user types and common tasks. Computer scripts can be written to move entire pages, or move content by fields (such as title, body, meta elements, or other discrete items). While this MOOC does share the theoretical elements of Content Strategy, there is a much greater emphasis on its application. In the next section, we’ll discuss the basic steps to follow when creating a content management strategy. If you have a Content Management System, you should to enter the tags directly into your CMS. See why Smartsheet is the platform you need to drive achievement, no matter the scale of your ambition. Some agencies have launched an early version their new site in “beta,” running it in parallel with the old site. Is it easy to tag content with appropriate metadata? Once you’ve got a strategy in place, and identified the type of migration you’ll do, it’s time to migrate your content to the new CMS. A content management strategy allows system integration, business intelligence, and process management (all powered by a foundation of quality information) to work together to discover, analyze, and deliver insights in user-friendly formats (e.g. If you don’t have a Content Management System, you’ll need to add these tags manually as HTML code. This post is tightly focused on CMS workflow, but as I mentioned earlier, you can’t ignore the broader content strategy … ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. However, launching on time with a buggy and unreliable system isn’t a good outcome. When developing your content strategy, ask: Content strategy news and articles—news feed of the latest articles on content strategy from CMSWire. Provide regular updates throughout the migration process, highlight successes and flag potential problems, to keep everything on track. Time—even if you have the skills, do those people with the skills have the time? The larger the project, the more likely you’ll need some help to complete it in a reasonable timeframe. A content management system is an all-encompassing system that will help you create, manage, distribute, publish, and archive all of the content that you put onto your site. While it’s important to maintain a single source of truth within the organization for digital content, it’s also equally important that you’re also able to easily connect that content with the many places content lives externally. Document as lessons learned for future migration projects, and share with your colleagues. Secure .gov websites use HTTPS Establish a Content Management System. Our world-class consulting team is here to help your organization realize the lasting advantage of Smartsheet. According to Caitlin Pinkerton, Regional Marketing Specialist at Commscope, “[Digital asset management] has been great for collaboration. The fact of the matter is: content marketing can be a bear to handle. Before you shut down the old site, run the old and new sites in parallel to test everything, and make sure all your content migrated over and works properly. It may even lead you to reevaluate the viability of existing policies and processes in your content strategy. Now that we’re all clear on what content management systems are and what they can do, what are some of their pros and cons? How a Content Management System Can Help Streamline Your Business ... s being used to provide some of the most sophisticated enterprise web solutions that are critical to modern business strategy. Additional built-in post types include menus, media attachments, and, yes, posts. You will need developer support for ongoing general system maintenance. Over 70,000 brands and millions of information workers trust Smartsheet to help them accelerate business execution and address the volume and velocity of today's collaborative work. Contribute by answering questions, writing a component/module, testing new versions, or writing documentation. Keeping your website informative, dynamic, up to date, and attractive is necessary for it to act as an efficient marketing tool for your business. Have a question about government services? Also follow these best practices for 404 (page not found) errors. The following tips should help you figure out what you need. For questions about this website, email
[email protected]. Check links, test functionality, make sure your search box and any other tools work correctly. For example, an article like this one is content, but a stream of raw data such as a list of purchases made through an ecommerce site is not. Guidance on building better digital services in government. Your agency likely already has a hosting solution in place, so you’ll need to coordinate on how the site will be hosted. Use normal communications channels such as listservs or social media to keep people informed. While a framework can ultimately be set up to do many of the things a content management system does, it takes a fair amount of coding and is best suited for companies that have access to coding resources, and those that have specialized needs that aren’t well suited by off the shelf solutions. There’s a few key factors to bear in mind as you develop your selection criteria and evaluate different alternatives: You should now have all the information you need to create a content management strategy, and start choosing and implementing a content management system. It’s important to select a solution that works for you, not one that leaves you feeling that it’s actually the one in charge. Now that you’ve gotten an understanding of content management systems and the different types available, we’ll take a deeper dive into how exactly they work. It will help you to understand how best to measure your content to maximize its effectiveness relative to the time you commit to it. A post is a post is a post, right? Creating Your Winning Content Management Strategy Picture this; all of your writers and graphic designers are out of the office for a conference. Read this article on. Are you reaching customers via their preferred channel? Weebly. Make sure to budget enough time and resources for testing from the beginning, and verify that you have the flexibility to take even more time if necessary. Communications—who will keep managers, program offices and content owners informed of progress, and help you articulate benefits and success? In this article, we’ll discuss want you need to know about about content management systems, and outline the basics of content management so you can understand the key steps in creating a content management strategy. While a content management system is typically an out-of-the-box solution with the key features most users will need, a framework is more of an underlying technology that ensures different components of your content are compatible with each other and can be programmed to automate various processes. Because there are pros and cons with any of these tools, the system you choose should reflect your agency’s goals and objectives. Managing brand content is about more than simply storing assets. Do your best to stick to promised timelines and deadlines, so stakeholders remain supportive. Dublin Core tags can be used to describe “things”, and Schema.org tags can describe relationships between those things. Join 60,000 others in government and sign-up for our newsletter — a round-up of the best digital news in government and across our field. Technically, pretty much everything in the WordPress database is a post. Does it support search engine optimization (SEO) with such features as customizable metadata, static URLs, customized breadcrumbs, and support for microdata? A successful migration depends on support from management and buy-in from stakeholders. Do you manage several different websites? Learn about our premium resource and portfolio management platform, 10,000ft by Smartsheet. Is it easy to move content off the site or to an online archive? A digital asset management (DAM) system is designed to do just that. Good for Document Management: For organizations that are more focused on internal collaboration rather than publishing content online, these options may be worth considering. Technical skills on your team—do you have people on your team who are experts in your new CMS? Content Migration Validation Checklist (MS Excel, 41 KB, 1 sheet, December 2012). Use this Use this sample CMS User Roles and Needs (MS Word, 13 KB, 1 page, December 2012) to document different types of CMS users and the common tasks each will need to perform. Institute regular and frequent meetings with contractors, to keep everyone up-to-date, identify and mitigate problems early-on, and ensure everything flows smoothly. Learn more about the key features of a CMS that can help boost your efforts. Once they’re on board, make sure the contractors are in the loop on all the prep work you’ve done up to this point. 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