Table Of ContentWeb Content Management
Systems, Features, and Best Practices
Deane Barker
Web Content Management
by Deane Barker
Copyright © 2016 Deane Barker. All rights reserved.
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978-1-491-90812-9
[LSI]
Dedication
For Mom.
I finally figured out what I want to be when I grow up.
Foreword
The web content management industry has evolved substantially over the past two
decades. Today, CMS vendors and industry pundits put overarching emphasis on
“customer experience management,” the idea that successful customer interactions should
drive all your digital investments. This is a useful prioritization, inasmuch as we should all
be thinking “screen first” (i.e., how do customers experience our digital incarnations?)
After all, why produce digital content unless people actually want to consume it?
But this emphasis on experience management sometimes relegates the process of
producing and publishing high-quality information to the backseat. We can all understand
why marketers pay more attention to frontend design, mobile strategies, and social
micromessaging, but in doing so they risk losing focus on deeper forms of information-
based engagement.
Consider the nearly ubiquitous desire to create more personalized digital interactions.
Many personalization strategies start with the premise, “assume suitable content for each
interaction.” This begs many questions. Suitable content from where? How will it be
managed? How will it get chunked? How will we vary it for each and every audience?
How will it get assembled? How will we simulate all the permutations? Behind those
questions lie some thorny content management challenges.
On the brighter side, the last few years have seen the rise of “content strategy” as an
important digital discipline. What exactly people mean by content strategy will vary, but
the general idea is that you need to have your content house in order before you start
executing business strategies across various digital channels.
The emergence of a new generation of digital content strategists is a welcome
development, though I sometimes wish they would better understand the organizational
environments where their strategies need to live. Content strategies that look great on day
1 can get messy by day 365, let alone day 730. You need to sort out simple authoring and
approval regimes; you need to find and modify previous versions of campaigns; you need
to integrate analytics into subsequent iterations; you need to archive older information so
it doesn’t clog up your search engine results. And so on.
So, the WCM industry is experiencing some key gaps today, and we need people who can
effectively bridge those gaps. Like the gap between content creation and content
consumption. The gap between content strategies and CMS implementations. Between
business needs and architectural patterns. Between authors and marketers. Between
developers and campaign managers. Between strategists and implementers. Deane Barker
is the rare individual who can speak to all those concerns.
As a New Zealander happily transplanted to North America, Deane has the ability to get
passionately engaged yet also take the outsider’s critical perspective. At first blush this
book is a primer on essential CMS topics, but when you read more deeply you’ll find it’s
really an argument — a passionate call to treat web content and processes around it as
seriously as you treat any other business or marketing asset.
