TaylorMade

In Content Management - Part 2 I spoke about the importance training everyone involved in content management in your organisation. The next important step is to ensure you set standards.

By setting standards you will ensure that before anyone is let loose on your website(s) they have a baseline understanding and if they don’t conform you have a set of regulations to refer them to.

Editorial Board

First of all consider setting up an Editorial Board that oversees all work on your website, sets standards, makes recommendations and central decisions on future direction. Once your CMS is embedded no doubt there will be requirements for add-ons or common applications. Don’t let all your hard work become undone by allowing people to do their own thing as it’s the start of a slippery slope. An Editorial Board should not stem innovation or creativity but it should set the boundaries and promote enthusiasm through endorsement and publicity.

Have regular meetings, once a month should suffice and ensure all of your key stakeholders are part of this group. It’s essential to get the right mix of people from those focused solely on your business objectives to the most IT literate.

Guidance

Ok so staff are trained an Editorial Board is in place, now can you start? No! There are at least 3 key policies you need to set in place.

1. Web Publising Policy - Whether it’s a central policy or by business area do make sure you have a publishing policy in place. All users should be clear on the dos and don’ts before they publish information on your website. It may be that some of these rules are governed by other policies or legislation, for example FOI, others may be part of your corporate standards. The level of granularity is entirely down to you but the more detailed your publishing policy is the harder it will be to maintain and get buy in from users. Keep it at a fairly high level so that it covers a wide range of topics but won’t become dated in a weeks time, becoming a tedious chore to enforce and adhere to.

2. Web Standards - As someone who champions accessibility and usability, web standards are close to my heart. If you have no awareness of web standards there are reams and reams of information on the web
so clue yourself in and set a standard. Aim for the highest possible within your resources and if there’s a lack of expertise in your organisation, consider buying it in (contact me!). Once you have that expertise, have those standards at hand for all of your users, from designers and developers to content providers and content authors. In the NICS we have such standards and as these were written over 4 years ago, I’m currently redrafting these. Web standards should not just be about accessibility and the WCAG. Also think about Style and Tone. When should users upload PDFs, how long should web pages be, how are those common terms, names etc spelt? These are just some of the issues you need to address when developing a Style and Tone guide.

3. Audit - When we think of audit we usually think of those people who question everything we do, this is perhaps your most invaluable service. Often underestimated and usually not liked, an audit process keeps everything in check, ensures everyone is playing by the rules and gives you the comfort of knowing that if any awkward questions are asked, you have the answers at hand. In the NICS I audit all new websites before they go live against WAI AA standards. Reports are produced using a traffic light system and Departments take responsibility for addressing issues. Before any site is permitted to go live it must meet at least WAI A standards, be cross browser compatible and adhere to corporate standards. By doing this we know we are legal, we know everyone is at least meeting baseline standards and although we’re not in competition, we know we are ahead of our counterparts.

So that concludes part 3, I could expand on the issues above, I could mention the need for corporate standards but if you want your CMS to succeed, your website to succeed and most of all, your staff to succeed then these are the minimum procedures you must put in place.

In my last post I started to talk about training but quite possibly the most important aspect I didn’t touch on was training the end user.

The users of your CMS, your content authors and content approvers are the most important people in contributing to your website. If you have a large scale site say covering 15-20 different departments, the most natural approach is for each area to nominate at least one member of staff to attend training and maintain their content.

Do not do this!

Firstly look at each area. Investigate how often they update their section? Is it daily, weekly, monthly or even quarterly? If you have any area which is update infrequently is it really worth training someone? Perhaps. if they make mass changes but if you’re talking small amendments, take the benefit of my experience and look at other means.

Ideally content management is a tool for non-technical users but that’s an easy assumption to make. Firstly users must have a grasp of website structure. A few years ago I had to deal with a user who knew how to use the CMS but didn’t understand when they needed to create a page and where to put it in the website hierarchy or why they couldn’t link to a document on their hard drive etc. The basic problem was this person was not familiar with the web and quite frankly, was the wrong person to send on the course.

In most organisations there will be a small number of non-technical staff who are quick to learn, they use the web every day and in some cases, run their own websites, blogs etc. These are the people you want to train and take responsibility for more than one area in your organisation. Instead of training tens of people in your organisation, consider smaller, dedicated numbers, people who are enthusiastic and will take your website forward.

I remember talking a few years back to one of our staff trainers who had put through hundreds of people through the CMS course. The biggest problem they faced was that many people lacked basic IT literacy skills. People who couldn’t use a mouse, didn’t know how to cut n paste, were being sent on a course to manage website. Just crazy! But this was all because there was no thought given to a training strategy, no committment from the top to make appropriate resources available, to identify and train the right people.

With the right people in place this reaps rewards for your website, where content is updated regularly, is well written and standards consistently met.

There will be other benefits too as its likely these people will need less support plus individuals can become experts and give on the job training, cutting down on the need to send people on expensive courses.

Consider too giving these people a forum, an opportunity to air their views, share their ideas, concerns as well as good news.

No play on titles this time, no attempt at clever puns, in this blog entry I want to talk straight about my experience of Content Management in a large organisation, the pitfalls, the benefits and important steps to put place for successful implementation.

I personally do not like reading through reams and reams of text on screen so for that reason I will split this discussion into a few parts.

I have over 4 years development experience with Livelink WCM Presentation Server (which I refer to as Livelink herein), formerly known as Obtree and now owned by Opentext. CMS Watch list it as on of the Major Suite Vendors as rightly so Livelink is one of the big player in the world of commerical content management products. I say commercial as there as many excellent open source products out there, such as Joomla or CMS Made Simple, which I recently implemented on the Take1 Take 2 website.

Livelink is the strategic CMS for the Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS), so it’s used on almost all main Departmental sites and subsites, in fact more than 70% use Livelink. My experience ranges from developing sites from scratch to integration with external applications, technical consultancy to third party contractors and also managing first level support to IT Assist, the NICS ICT Shared Service Centre.

At the outset, Livelink seemed a very complicated tool to use. An intensive 3 day training course introduced me a GUI unlike any other I’d used, using concepts that were totally unfamiliar to me. However, I grasped it first time and soon learned the basics in a short space of time. Many others that were trained after me didn’t though and even with extending the course to 5 days, experienced programmers were still struggling to get to grips with the Site Administrator.

In the roll out of Livelink and migration of sites to Livelink the standard of training has been a fundamental flaw from the start. It’s hard to believe that company of the size of Opentext have very few trainers but not only that, have the poorest documentation you’re ever likely to see and as for their support forum, less said the better!

As a result I feel that, with the exception of my own team, the CMS is under utilised. Applications and documents are largely hosted outside of Livelink, built using a range of technologies and little standardisation put in place were needed. Livelink is a very powerful CMS but because most developers are versed well enough, it’s used to do the simple, static stuff.

So Step 1 - before putting any CMS in place, make absolutely sure that training is available from more than one supplier, that it’s delivered to a high standard and that a quality support structure is in place.

An addendum to this would be to think about internal support. When the NICS procured Livelink no one actually thought about who was going to provide support to our own developers and content authors. As a result it’s all a bit haphazard and where areas have their own IT team, responsibilities can become very clouded and it’s the end users that often are left hanging.

So Step 2 - Before implementation identify an appropriate resource to provide technical support to your staff. Note support can cover a wide range of issues and users. For example, often problems lie with server set up, replication etc so make sure that you cover all bases and if necessary, outsource!

That’s all for now, I hope there are people who can relate to this and learn from my experience. Please feel free to share your thoughts or point out anything I’ve missed so far.