Have you heard the story bundle of sticks? If not, Monks break the vow of silence to narrate you this story.
Once there was a farmer who had four sons. Sons didn’t work together and kept fighting for better crop results. Farmer once called all four of them and narrated a play “United we stand, Divided we fall”, where he took a stick and broke it. The stick got broken off easily. Thereafter, he collected some dozens of sticks together and tried to break the bundle of sticks and the sticks didn’t break. He passed on the moral to his sons to stay united and work like the bundle of sticks for better results.
Likewise, CMS deployment carried out following a couple of best practices might not turn around your website drastically. For better results from your Content Management Systems, take the bundle of sticks approach, follow the below mentioned best practices collectively and reap the benefits from your CMS’.
- Plan the Content for your CMS
Before starting the deployment of your CMS, plan out the various content types you wish to incorporate. This includes knowledge articles, promotional advertorials, infographics, service catalog items, record producers and order guides.
- User friendly content structure
One of the biggest advantages of CMS is that it allows you to reorganize content in the way that makes the most sense for your customers with minimal diversion through clicks and links. Sketch a proper visual and content hierarchy that appeals the customers, reduces the bounce rate and improves the conversion. Leading CMS’ like Joomla, Drupal and WordPress allow you to pull monthly reports of the most viewed content so to enable you to change the content structure as per the popularity.
- Content Lifecycle
Determine a content lifecycle for your every piece of content. Makes sure the obsolete content is flushed out from the CMS and new content is periodically updated. With advanced facilities to hide and archive content, companies can remove the content not required from the CMS and at the same time keep it searchable.
- Multiple administration Roles
Ideally, most companies resort to a CMS because it provides a flexibility of having multiple users managing the same website. This way the workload is shredded among a few users and every user will have individual accountability. Identify the group of users to be given various roles for the management of the CMS. Set various approval levels, if need be. Overall having authorities in place will let the content flow in timely manner and keep the website up to date. Blend emergency workflows so to ensure that there is no delay in passing important communication out to stakeholders.
- Phased Implementation
Go step by step and implement the CMS in phases. Like a software or ERP system, it is better to implement the CMS in various phases. Identify the users that require CMS the most. Let them start using it and add on more users as and when required.
- Setting of standards and Monitoring
Implementation of CMS is never complete without setting standards, set processes, naming conventions, content creation calendar and practices etc. Have the set standards and keep monitoring the actual performance of the CMS and individual task owners through a report. Ideally, devise performance metrics for better documented benefits of implementing a CMS.
It is mission critical to keep the content navigation up to the mark and the overall website ambiance appealing. Implementing any of the leading CMS’ like Joomla, Drupal or WordPress will enable you to manage the entire website easily and in a controlled way. Do not forget if you miss out on any of these vital best practices, your CMS will be fragile will multiple loopholes just like the four sons who couldn’t get the benefits of the crop because they were not working in sync with one another.
Webby Monks
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