Lovell Communications Inc.

One of the joys of developing a site is helping write content and decide how to effectively engage an online audience with a notoriously short attention span. Whether it’s a redesign or reimplementation of an existing infrastructure, or a complete ground up redevelopment project, the devil is in the details.

Not long ago, many organizations’ websites were managed by the IT department. This made sense, because the site lived on the infrastructure provided by IT. But the role of many corporate websites has evolved from a simple online brochure to a robust user experience. Today’s marketers are more involved in the day-to-day decision making affecting websites. In some organizations, marketers are responsible for managing this next generation of websites, giving rise to a hybrid group of marketers, often with technical skills as programmers and designers. With this has come added responsibility to produce and manage content. Fortunately a wide variety of software tools, known as content management systems, have emerged to make automate the marriage of marketing and IT.

Why does content matter? One of the best ways of attracting visitors (and subsequently keeping their attention) is to generate strong content in a variety of forms – the written word, audio such as MP3 or podcasts, video such as Flash or Silverlight, and impressive images – that users want to interact with. Content is no longer just the domain of the news media. For example, Woot.com has blended hipster commentary with a quirky one-product-a-day strategy, to cultivate a base of raving fans for whom reading the product description is almost as much fun as shopping. In Woot’s case, content makes all the difference.

Your site may be a good candidate for a content management system if:

• You frequently change the wording on the same sections of your site, such as the home page
• You need to change photos or bios of staff regularly
• You want to launch a podcast
• You add news to the site on a monthly or even weekly basis

Of course, it is always a good idea to calculate return on investment. If your site rarely changes, or your current process is efficient and satisfactory, it may be wise to wait until your next website overhaul to evaluate a content management system.

Regardless, even a simple content management system can automate tedious processes such as these, freeing your marketing and technical staff to focus on adding value and creativity where they’re needed most.