Businesses often overlook the importance of choosing the right CMS for their website project. This can impact not just the process of selecting the right CMS but the whole website project. Having worked on many different types of CMS projects over many years, the same issues appear over and over again. And most often these issues arise because of how the requirements are documented, or lack of documentation, or lack of project scope, or from limited understanding of content management systems issues. Below is a list of commonly seen mistakes when selecting a CMS, to help you make a better decision for your next website development project. Most of these mistakes are simple to resolve by taking a common-sense approach in the selection process to the final deployment of the CMS that works for everyone; authors, translators, administrators and IT.

Summary

Most of these mistakes are overcome by taking a common-sense approach in the selection process to the final deployment of the CMS that works for everyone; authors, translators, administrators and IT. Start by understanding the content management issues, weigh your options and most of all set clear business goals as soon as you can. These will help you identify the requirements for your CMS solution. Success depends on those who will use the software on a daily basis, be realistic with your organizations capacity. And, however you organize to make the selection process for your business the following tips will help you.

• Do not skip the content strategy: Once you know what your business goals are and how you will achieve them with your website content, you will have a much better task of choosing the right CMS. But never choose your CMS without knowing what and how you need to accomplish.
• Focus on business goals and desired outcomes over processes: Unless if the CMS offers a better process, focus on what you want to accomplish instead of trying to adjust your current working methods to fit the CMS system.
• Test, test, test: Plan and create a testing environment right from the start to test future development works or upgrades. Do not take any major changes to your live version of the CMS unless you have tested it on your testing environment.

Go to First Mistake

• Establishing the business needs and goals
• Identifying the website design or management requirements
• Creating an overall web strategy
• Identifying the website functionality

 Go to Next Mistake

• What will be the important challenges that the implementation project will face?
• What are the main features that differentiate from others?
• What are the main design issues which might cause problems in the near future?
• What was the developer's main intent originally?
• What are the proposed "Best Practice" approaches to content management?
• What kind of problems does the CMS solve the best?

Go to Next Mistake

At first most CMSs will look similar with their functionalities but further investigation will reveal their differences and how they are hugely different from the other.

Go to Next Mistake

These are questions that arise in almost every selection process and most often bigger is not better. Paying more for a CMS does not automatically make your choice a better one for you.

It is also a major mistake to associate the number of features, plug-ins or add-ons a CMS has with the never-ending possibilities it can offer to you. I have yet to work on a serious CMS project that did not require modifications to plugins or add-ons anyway. Nevertheless, the idea is to keep the CMS simple and small enough to accomplish your business goals.

Go to Next Mistake

Some businesses end up by identifying some requirements which are available in all of the CMS solutions. For example, requesting for a WYSIWYG editor with CMS is an ineffective requirement since all of them already offer it.

Other examples of unclear requirements would be not to provide enough detail or context which will make it hard to evaluate during the evaluation process. For example, requesting that the CMS integrate with social media is an ineffective requirements since it is very hard to evaluate if the level of integration will accomplish the business goals.

Having too many requirements is also ineffective. If for some reason you notice that the number of requirements is growing than it would be best to categorize them as "must-have" or "nice-to-haves". These categorization of requirements will help you when it comes to evaluate the CMS solutions.

Go to Next Mistake

One approach would be to ask about how each CMS can meet your "must-have" requirements or needs. And evaluating your choices based on "how" the CMS meets your need.

Go to Next Mistake

It is better to separate the task of designing from developing the CMS. Otherwise, your new design will be guided by the developer's functionality limitations instead of the designer's usability guidelines.

Go to Introduction

In a previous blog Creating a website alone will not get you the results you want we stress the importance that having an effective website will drive you traffic, leads and sales. Content is king! 

And for content to be king, you need to go through a certain process and develop a content plan for your website. 10 questions to ask yourself which will get you started developing your website content.

10 questions for developing effective content for your website

1. What are the popular services or products your clients/prospects most want and need?
2. What are your organization strengths and weaknesses?
3. What are the customer needs that your products or services satisfy?
4. Describe your typical customer (needs, desires, preferences, fears, pain, etc.). What can you say about your best customers?
5. Who is your competition?  (list them)
6. What makes your organization different than your competitors? Why should someone choose you over the other?
7. Do you have an existing tagline, slogan or brand statement?
8. How do you attract new customers now?
9. What are the keywords that new customers might use to find you online?
10. What is your target geographical location (international/national/regional/state/local)?

You might not have all the answers to these questions at first but with time and an effort it will be clear to you and your organization.

The answers to these question will then help you in writing the website copy page per page.

How to plan writing content for each page?

For each page in your proposed website architecture, the objective should be to keep it simple and stupid for your customers. After the page title (main header) of the page the second most important content will be the first paragraph. This paragraph should summarize the page and link to the main call-to-action. The ideal would be to have this paragraph so convincing to the user that they will follow through your call-to-action. For those who are not convinced at first, you can develop further each argument you made in the original paragraph and back them up with supportive points. Do this until you have completely developed your main arguments and provided supportive follow up points. At the end of the page, make sure you provide a clear direction to the user as to where they should go next.

While writing your copy for each web page you must consider that you are writing for your reader (the human behind the screen), it is important to focus on what the page is all about. Here are some questions that will help you stay focused.

• What is the desired outcome of this page?
• Who is the target of this page?
• What are the 3 primary benefits you want to communicate?
• What keywords should you include for SEO?

Website content writing review questions

Once you have written your copy for your primary reader (the human), review your content to make sure you stayed focus and that the content will help you drive traffic from search engines (SEO) as well. Preparing a review checklist is a good practice, the following are some important questions to consider for your review questions:

• Is the page content greater than 300 words?
• Is the main page title clear and catchy?
• Is your content relevant to the targeted audience? Does the content incite the reader to take an action (desired outcome)?
• Is your first paragraph summarizing benefits and provoking a call-to-action?
• Is your content divided in sub-headers and paragraphs?
• Are you addressing the reader?
• Is there no spelling or grammatical errors?
• After reading the page will the reader know what to do next?

2012 was the year of the mobile smartphones & some predict 2013 will be the year for tablets.

To anyone who manages a website, it is apparent that mobile & tablet use is increasing and for most it is becoming the device choice to browse or shop on the internet.

This change causes a major challenge to a web designer. Not only does a website designer need to accommodate the different browsers and their versions they must absolutely tailor to the different devices and their size.

Traditionally, web designers would create web pages for the latest browsers that would also work on older versions of browsers. The traditional web design strategy was then replaced with the principle of creating a simple document with the lowest common denominator compatible for all browsers and by adding extra behavior or functionality using cascading style sheet or javascript.

The increase in popularity of the mobile & tablet made this latest strategy hard or expensive to manage for those business websites who had to cater to their mobile users. Some implemented multiple versions of the website using server side device detection techniques to accommodate the different browsers, devices, and screens.

Responsive web design addresses this ever changing landscape of devices, browsers, screen sizes and orientation. This strategy basically is to create fluid layouts and adapt the website content to almost any viewer.

What does responsive web design mean for business websites?

If implemented properly, responsive websites:

1)      Reduces the need to manage multiple website content: Develop content once and have the CMS adapt to the viewing screen.

2)      Allows the possibility to offer a better user experience by catering to the most desired functionality by user type.

3)      Can increase website stickiness and return visits because your website is user friendly on multiple devices now.

The responsive web design strategy is still in its early stages but evolving rapidly. It definitely looks like it is here to stay.

Is it worth to redesign your website?

Switching over to a responsive web design will be a challenge for your content, design & development teams, but with the way the industry is moving, it’ll prepare you for the future, and put you a step ahead of your competitors.