As someone who is interested in Content Strategy (CS) this article is a “half baked” summary of the evening. It was peopled mostly by web/ux professionals and focused on “how” to use CS in real world projects. I came away feeling that there is still a vast chasm between the thoughts and ideas emerging from web/ux professionals to how our clients are thinking. Ideas need to be more developed and our clients need to be educated. From the speakers comments it seemed that CS is more established in the US, in the UK it still seems to be at the innovator stage. Long term ambitions are to make it into a practice.

Some of the questions that concerned people at the event included:

1. where does CS fits with online strategy? The favourite comment is that CS is business strategy, especially when your business is about generating content
2. how to sell CS to clients as part of the production process? The response here focused on what a website would look like without CS e.g. website would look like it it did on day 1, content would be out of date or no longer accurate on key sections, content would be an afterthought.
3. Who takes on the role of the content strategist in a team where there isn’t one? This should be whoever cares most about the content, if you’re thinking about it then it’s you!
4. Content strategy and User generated content (UGC)? Organisations need to understand what their tolerance is to UGC. Managemet must be willing to accept the reality of what UGC can be.
5. How to presuade clients that have left a train wreck of a website that are excited about social media to fix their content.
6. How do you measure CS Return On Investment when it’s about qualitative metrics? e.g. as brand enhancement, is it better than advertising?
7. How are we going to solve the content production business models. This is the big question of the questions, no real answer here though the panel did at least think about this!

It’s still early days for CS and how it fits into any project, and every project is different. It was interesting seeing from different perspectives from the ux design and delivery side, e.g. an IA’s view versus project manager versus a developer.

Many Thanks to the 3 speakers who attended the event and for Johnathan Kahn (@lucidplot) for arranging the event and for allowing an open discussion to take place.

Links
The Discipline of Content Strategy
Content Strategy: A Reading Guide
On discovering content strategy : Black Marks on Wood Pulp

WordPress has also been added to the CMSWatch’s Web Content Management Research Channel. Does that make it a Web CMS?

The problem with such a statement is that it is very subjective. Some people think it is and some don’t, neither are wrong, but can they both be right?

Most of our clients have a website (or two) running on WordPress which is typically designed, developed and supported by a local web Agency, such deployments are sometimes rushed in to meet a tight deadline as there is a bottleneck to migrate the site designs onto the client’s primary CMS. As such WordPress is very commonly used, but only as part of suite of products delivering the client’s online communications, however we rarely see clients running their main site on WordPress.

I have to agree with Tony Byrne that if you are using it as a CMS then it is a CMS. WordPress has rightly earned it’s place as the #1 Open Source CMS (in terms of popularity), and we shouldn’t take that away from it.

First let’s start with a definition from Wikipedia :

A market with a high freedom of choice will create a certain degree of inequality by favouring the upper 20% of the items (“hits” or “head”) against the other 80% (“non-hits” or “long tail”). This is known as the Pareto principle or 80–20 rule.

Above is an example of a power law graph showing popularity ranking. To the right is the long tail; to the left are the few that dominate. Notice that the volumes of both areas match.

Looking at the number of CMS products published by CMS Watch there is evidence that the Long Tail applies also to CMS systems. We’ve heard of most of the vendors on the CMS Watch list, they regulary come up on long lists, have large revenues from licenses or services, have large development community and clients bases, and they are most likely to the left of the diagram. We also come across others that are not on the list or those that have been developed by Agencies or an inhouse team, these systems are in the in the “long tail” with low volume sales, number of clients using their products and small development communities.

So some “proof” that there is a correlation between the entertainment industry and CMS systems. And if you need to select a CMS system, are you going for something that is the “top of the pops” or an obscure artist that nobody has heard of?

Related posts

• Long Tail – Wikipedia
• CMS Vendors
• Long Tail: Boon for Consumer, Bust for Producer? by Gerry McGovern

• old CMS products we grew to love and hate have been acquired, all the large independent players (Vignette, Stellent, Interwoven) have now been acquired, opening the way for new entrants into the market
• online communities are more important than vendor viability. Proprietary vendors now realising the importance of developing communities, encouring their products to be discussed openly online warts and all! This kind of information wasn’t readily available thanks to vendors wanting to control “the message”.
• open source and SaaS are now being seriously considered alongside purchasing licenses for proprietary systems. Historically decisions about Open Source were made at the outset, rather than being largely irrelevant.
• ease of use is king. You no longer have to go on several days of training to grapple with clunky interfaces in order to manage your content, some content management functions can be performed without any training at all!
• You get more for less. Prices for licensed software have come down providing CMS buyers with more functionality that ever before for less.
• Downloading and try software. Some vendors allow you to try their software for free, and not demand several days consultancy services to come in and install the system.
• the rise of social media, means that products are fundamentally being rearchitected from where the content management is performed on the back end as well on the front end.

I’m sure there are more aspects to the revolution that I’ve missed that you will come up with. I ran the idea of a CMS revolution past Tony Byrne who partly agreed with me! So what are your thoughts, are we in a CMS revolution or is CMS software as bad as ever?

I’ve been thinking along the same lines for the past couple of years.

CMS vendors and products put Content at the heart of the system, and couple of years ago that was the accepted way to think about the content on the web. Web content was “stuff” that you would publish, we concentrated on structure, workflow, layout & design etc. But we were not really concentrating on *who* was going to read it, if they were going to read it all. Web content for the most part was worthless (and still is!) and we continued to publish content that didn’t help our users find what they are looking for. Chris states that *YOU* are king, perhaps it is time we thought differently about content?!

User centered content?

We have all adopted User Centered Design approaches to designing the user experience, this is where design is based on the needs of the user. So where does content fit into all this ?

Like design, we need to think about user centered Content, which is written from a users’ perspective. We need to turn our perspective around so we’re empathising with the user and asking what they would ask, and in the language they would use. Website content frequently needs to be rewritten from “inside out” to an “outside in” view of the organisation, this frequently requires a 180 degress shift in our thinking.

Olalah puts it very well in a recent tweet.

What about the content on your site, is it written from a user’s perspective? What about the information architecture and website navigation? Have you stepped into the audiences’s shoes, does ‘I’ and ‘we’ mean your audience or you?

Other related posts
When content was King

• They performed the same functions e.g. content publishing, versioning, workflow, searching etc.
• They used similar ter`minology to refer to the products e.g. Content Server, Deliver server, modules etc.
• The vendors presentations were performed in much the same way, e.g. complany profile, client list, product demos

I agree, that CMS demos can be a bit of  a blur especially when you have a few on the same day! Most clients want to focus on content, usability, and their audiences, and they do not want a CMS selection project to be about “technology”. CMS selection teams should consist of staff from different departments and skillsets e.g. IT, finance, Marketing, Press and Communication, and it is easy for them to become overwhelmed with the amount of information they need to make sense of.

With an estimated 4000 CMS systems in the world there is a vast amount of choice out there. CMSWatch covers around 40 products as part of their WCM report, so the evidence suggests that they are not the same! Even on a shortlist of 2 vendors they usually differ in their :

• strengths and weaknesses
• licenses models,
• costs (and discounts),
• implementation partners,
• customers,
• sizes and types of projects,
• architecture etc.

So next time anyone in your team says “but they are all the same!” whack them over the head with this post!

See Also

5 Biggest Mistakes in CMS Selection

To help me write this article I enlisted the help of the folks on twitter, so why is CMS licensing so complicated?

Twitter feedback

Jon Marks (@mcBoof)  has written an excellent article titled When CMS Licensing Shafts Architecture , where comprises have to be made to the CMS solution architecture due to how products are licensed. Jon’s article states that a CMS may be licensed :

• A per site or domain cost – the vendor should clarify about what constitutes a “site”
• A per machine / CPU cost – some vendors which will charge extra for each server a particular product is deployed.
• A cost for each named CMS user or editor or a concurrent user limit .
• A cost depending on the environment e.g. development, test, staging, production and disaster recovery.

Useful replies from @scrump & @proops below :

One size does not fit all

twitter post regarding Modules and maintenance

When buying a CMS what are you buying ?

To try to answer why it is complicated let’s look at what you are actually purchasing :

In summary :

Buying a CMS is fairly complicated as it involves buying software as well the hardware, hosting and support. Having a complex model may be necessary because:

• One size doesn’t fit all. Why should you pay for functions that you will never use? You will not have the same numbers of users or sites as the next client.
• Modules provide the flexibility of including additional functionality at a later time. This allows clients with a lower initial cost to get started. However modules can significantly increase the CMS license cost as they may also be licensed by site and users, there is also the additional support & environments costs to be considered.

What I would like to see is:

• Openess and transparency in pricing. A fixed price list, with same prices for all customers. I regularly see quotes provided to more than one client at the same time, and know what is each
• Simplified pricing. As above a standard price list so that clients know how much each and module costs, and what would happen if they changed X. We all know the price of an 60 GB Ipod classic.
• A definition of what is a site. Clients may need to implement microsites for marketing campaigns under specific domains, are these sites? Even if they are shortlived ? What about subdomains?
• Serious thought given to CMS scalability and performance as part of CMS selection & licensing, how will the architecture scale to cater for additional content and site visitors? Architectural changes further down the line could impact on the licensing e.g. additional servers and CPU’s usually mean additional license costs.

What I would welcome the end of :

• Highly inflated “optimistic” list prices which are then heavily discounted.
• Pricing by
  • CPU core, dual core are now more expensive the quad core.
  • Registered public user
  • CPU Megahertz (I think this practice may be dead, but is related to CPU cores).
  • Content Editor, concurrent editors make more sense.
• Additional costs for commodity functions such as blogs, forums, surveys, polls, accessibility checking, link checking etc. Clients expect do not pay extra for these functions.

What has your experience been when pricing CMS systems, has it been straightforward or are you having to go back to the vendor every time a change is needed?

1. why is nobody publishing this info?
2. why don’t people trust this info to techcrunch?
3. Are people not launching web apps?

Well clearly people are launching webapps and the market for web apps must be in the billions. Figures are readily available for the size of the online advertising market and reports abound about how online advertising spend has now overtaken TV in the UK. However what I would like to see are figures for the CMS market i.e. :
1. cms software license purchases (including support and upgrades)
2. cms services (including marketing, discovery, design & development)

The CMS vendors and agencies do publish their revenues, but do they split the cost of services versus revenue, do agencies and system integrators split their revenue based on CMS revenue compared to say bespoke builds?

A quick sum of the top100 agencies (sorry registration is required) gives us around £1 billion, but how of this is attributed to CMS, and what about the thousands of smaller agencies and one man bands not included in these figures?

What about Open source CMS service revenues?

Do you know the size of the UK CMS market? Is it growing or shrinking ? What is the change over the last year ? Any pointers would be welcome !

The salient points about the CMS jobs trends for me are :

CMS Jobs demand

The total number of permanent jobs is down from 2086 to 1152, however the proportion of jobs is up from 7.7% to 10.42% since last year. The graph below shows the demand trend from May 2004 showing a steady increase.

CMS jobs demand trend from 2004 to Sept 2009

Salaries

The average salary is down by 7% from £35,000 to £32,500 which appears to be the lowest average since these records bagan in May 2004. The range of salaries has also narrowed with the 90% percentile now around the mid £40k’s, more evidence that now is the best time to hire.

CMS jobs salary trend from 2004 to 2009

The salary histogram below shows the most of the jobs are concentrated between £25k – £40k, hiring developers isn’t going to be cheap, however this range also provides developers with salary progression in line with their experience. There is the usual “long tail” of salaries upwards from £50k showing only a small number of senior opportunities available.

CMS jobs salary Histogram

Application Platform

The table below lists the applications platforms mentioned in a CMS jobs over 6 months period until 11th September. The list is a mix of java/.Net/LAMP technologies and Commercial and Open Source software. There is a large number of .Net platforms e.g. Episerver, Sitecore, Umbraco and Immediacy joined by Open Source LAMP based ones notably Drupal & Joomla.

Application development

No suprises that the table below shows that web interface development and .Net dominate the skills required for CMS development.

CMS application development

Your thoughts?

What does these trends mean to you?

As a developer or an agency would you join the ranks of those providing services on the most popular application platforms or concentrate on what you knew, irrespective of what the market was looking for? As for salaries, would the drop in average salaries influence you in anyway?

As a CMS buyer would you factor in a particular application platforms market presence and the number of skilled developers and agencies that specialised in it? Would you rule out a CMS if it didn’t have a large base of developers or partners?

It is going to be interesting to see what these trends might be like in a year or two’s time and whether todays major players are still in demand tomorrow.

1. “don’t know” or
2. “our site can support up to x hundred/thousand concurrent users and there are a number of issues we are trying to iron out”

I was surprised to learn that most prospective clients *don’t know* the capacity of their website or service and have no effective plans in place for when there is a sharp increase in site visitors and it crashes (and “to panic” or “reboot” is not a plan)! It is usually after events like a site crashing regularly that web managers begin to consider what they should do about it, of course by which time it is too little too late as the reputational damage has already been done with those visitors affected.

What do we mean by website capacity?

The website capacity is the number of visitors that it can support with each visitor performing representative tasks (browsing, searching, navigating etc.) within specified Service Level’s.

When is it important?

Sites grow in two directions, with increasing visitor numbers and with the amount of content, both of these increases affect the performance of your site. Increasing the number of visitor could slow down the user experience and your visitors won’t hang around if your site is slow or irresponsive, it takes just seconds to arrive at a website and even less to leave it! Increasing the amount of content could also mean that your website doesn’t scale well and page rendering performance is inadvertently affected e.g. bread crumbs and navigation systems may not be generated as quickly.

So *before* launching your next site ensure that you are reducing risk of service failure by specifying and testing a robust, resilient, scalable and redundant architecture. Knowing that your web site is able to support 100′s of users concurrently and also knowing where the bottlenecks are will inform you:

1. how and when the service is likely to fail, you will recognise this behaviour when and if it reoccurs
2. mitigate and reduce risk of service failure, and
3. allow you to build an appropriate business case to improve ongoing service delivery.

What can you do?

It useful to set a benchmark so you can demonstrate what effects any performance improvements your investment produces, there are usually some quick wins that can make a huge difference to your website capacity and in turn the user experience.

All of our clients now perform “stress testing” and ongoing capacity planning for their projects where service delivery within acceptable parameters is crucial. However this hasn’t always been the case.

Even with baked pages generated by some CMS systems there are a number of opportunities to improve your site capacity, e.g. by optimising your client side cache settings and will significantly reduce the number of connections that a user has to make to download each page.

Do you know the capacity of your website? What would you do if your visitor numbers due to a breaking news story suddenly increased 10 fold? 1000 fold? Could your website cope? Could you cope?