Most businesses use their website to publish articles on the internet to help promote their products and services. How you create content, manage updates and control how it is published and presented will affect the quality of your website.
The management of the information you use for marketing purposes will also define your image and reveal a perceived level of efficiency. That’s why Netflare recommend you use a content management system (CMS) to help you build your website and ensure your image is not tarnished by poor information management.
This article outlines the basic aspects of a content management system (CMS) and how to use it to manage your content. Used in the right way, a good CMS will give you a scalable information system that can be used throughout your organisation to present a professional image of your business and attract the customers you are looking for.
Creating your content
The first aspect of a CMS is content creation. It is important to have a good environment to manage your content that is easy to use. Your CMS will come complete with a “what you see is way you get” (WYSIWYG) content editor. This means you will be able to create and edit content much the same way as you do in your favourite word processor.
What’s more, because the CMS is used to manage and separate the content and the styling, you have the flexibility to control the presentation of all your content by making simple changes to your style rules. Your style rules will be kept separately in a file called a style-sheet.
As all your content will be held in the CMS, you will be able to create powerful linking between related articles. This is achieved by creating categories and terms to classify your articles, and then cross-referencing similarly classified articles. Classifying your articles will bring added benefits by automatically creating the appropriate metadata for the search engines to read.
With a CMS, you can also control who is able to create and edit your content. This means you will have the ability to allow multiple authors or contributors to manage your content.
Content Management
The second aspect of a CMS is management of your content. As your news items expire and offers come and go, you will need to be able to control how your content is published and who has the power to do so. With a CMS, you will have a workflow system that only allows the editing and publishing by those with the right privileges. What’s more, you will be able to specify activation and expiry dates to allow automatic publication and removal of articles.
Your CMS will also have a powerful version control system that can store every published change made. This means you have the flexibility to rollback any changes you have made in case of inaccuracies found.
Part of your website may have connections to external services such as affiliate sites that display your products, or you may use a web form generated by another provider. These external services can be integrated into your CMS to look like they are part of your website.
Publishing
The third aspect of a CMS is publishing. Your CMS will allow you to control the appearance of your content, where is it displayed and when it is added and removed. This means that once you have defined and integrated the graphic themes and the styling rules, you can safely publish your content knowing that its format will be consistent and appropriate, giving the authors the freedom to focus on the content alone.
Publishing also means that your content can be made accessible from different locations by automatically generated related links from similarly classified content. This could be from elsewhere within the same website or external links from other websites, search engines, reference directories, news and article publishing sites.
Presentation
The fourth aspect of a CMS is presentation. Your CMS will ensure your published content meets the required usability and accessibility standards. Other issues such as cross browser compatibility will also be managed and supported by your CMS.
Knowledge Management
Knowledge management is the nurturing of your business information to help you make informed and timely business decisions. The long term benefits of using a CMS are that your website will become a stable repository of your marketing information.
Using your CMS to store information, it can be used for training staff and customers, document management to hold a library of standard operating procedures, and references and resources for your prospects and customers.
As your CMS will be built from a standard and well known platform, you can take control and manage your maintenance issues, control costs and resources, and specify scalable IT structures such as hardware, software and database solutions to suit your business growth.