ReachCustomersOnline.com

Making a Better Content Management System

Posted by TimSlavin at November 18, 2004

"I did some research recently at OpenSourceCMS.com — a fantastic site that lets you play with dozens of CMS installations — and left pretty depressed. What I experienced was obtuse and complex software that was packed with gratuitous features at the expense of usability and user experience. It was software written by geeks, for geeks."

A new article from Adaptive Path, a companion to an earlier article about commercial CMS tools, Why Content Management Fails.

Normally I would not blog these items except Adaptive Path is a terrific company and I want to make a few points. First, the author focuses on huge companies and their website publishing needs. Tools like Contribute are near perfect for smaller businesses and brochure websites. Second, while his complaint about poor editorial processes is valid, like other writers he fails to describe how you set up an editorial process. (That's why I wrote an often linked article on this rarely covered topic, How To Create And Set Up An Editorial Process To Publish Web Content.) Finally, the experience at OpenSourceCMS is dead on: many of these tools are not user-friendly. That said, MoveableType and Expression Engine (and WordPad) are easy to install and use.
URLs:

http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000365.php


Why Content Management Fails

Comments

Post a comment

Name:

Email Address:

URL:
Remember Me? YesNo

Comments: