Cleve Gibbon

The importance of digital content to an organisation is growing year on year. At all levels, we’re hearing people asking for better ways to manage their content. Not as fast as we hoped, but this has led to advances in the way content management projects are run. The reality is that the success of content management projects depends heavily upon a company’s digital and content maturity, and the degree to which they are amenable to organisational change within that project’s timeframe. As an expert, consultant and/or supplier brought in to help deliver a content management project, the chosen build path is somewhat pre-determined.

This post is the first in a series short posts that looks at some of the common build paths content management projects take when delivering web sites. Not every project is the same but they do tend to follow a set of common delivery patterns. Let’s start at the beginning with the simple site.

Read the rest of this entry »

An on-going challenge for CMS build projects is that they are pre-dominantly design led with the primary focus set on publishing content. With less attention paid to users in content producing roles, editorial needs are rarely catered.  The new solution goes live and “The CMS” quickly becomes a dirty word because it has not been deployed to effectively create, understand and manage content.  Sound familiar?

Content producers do a lot of things – Create content, Find content, Re-use content, Value content, Review content, Tag content. The CMS also pulls its weight with content: storing, indexing, auto tagging, displaying, recommending, publishing and workflow. This requires us to think really hard about how we intelligently structure content. And that’s where the battle is waged today for both time and effort to do editorial thinking on CMS build projects.

Read the rest of this entry »