The Useful and Useless in Content Management Systems

Written February 13th, 2009 by Thomas Ames

In the age of Web 2.0 and 3.0, our content management systems are offering more features than ever.  We can give our users the options to embed our content, feed it to a reader, have it e-mailed to a friend, or texted to their phones.  For the Web czar, we can integrate content with a click of a button, have alerts e-mailed to us, and give our users limited access to make changes to their own content.  But while many features are obviously useful, some other features are still archaic, vestigial, or simply useless.

Has meta-based search engine optimization gone the way of frames, simply a vestigial organ to our otherwise Web 2.0 sites?  With the bigger, better search engines giving less and less value to our keywords and descriptions, are we wasting budgets on SEO companies?  Instead of meta-based optimization, we now concentrate on content-based and paid search optimization.

Is there a WYSIWYG editor out there that’s perfect?  In my experience of using over 20 different content management systems, I’ve yet to find a perfect WYSIWYG editor.  I would go so far as to say I’ve yet to find one adequate enough that I would allow a Web editor full access to making changes without my approval.  Put simply, the lack of simple, adequate coding for spacing and formatting is a main concern.  Not to mention that rarely does the preview option ever truly preview it in perfect WYSIWYG form.

What features of your CMS do you find vestigial or useless?

-Thomas Ames is the President of Polymath Consulting LLC.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 13th, 2009 at 10:32 am and is filed under content management system, information architecture, rss, Thomas Ames, usability, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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2 Responses to “The Useful and Useless in Content Management Systems”

  1. swanie Says:
    February 16th, 2009 at 9:04 am

    I’ve heard good things about LifeRay, but have never used it …

    http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/home

    Here’s an article (for place I heard this) on how Google is going to change …

    http://www.earlytorise.com/2009/02/13/what-the-latest-shift-in-search-engine-rankings-means-for-your-site.html

    By the sounds of the article, SEO (mechanically manipulating search engine results) will be nearly obsolete …

  2. Tom Stitt Says:
    March 10th, 2009 at 2:26 pm

    Why should the editor and the CMS be joined at the hip? Why not use Drupal where you can choose the editor(s) that fit you, your content managers? Always some issues to be sorted out in configuration. Always some complex content types that you might want to cause content managers to post for “preview” before going live.

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