… is a question I have been asking myself since myspace (remember that!) introduced to the world the ability to change your own profile picture A N Y t i m e. You see, before CMS, not only did sites get updated weekly, monthly, even yearly (gasp!) BUT sites were updated by someone who knew illustrator, photoshop, dreamweaver, imageready AND resolution, HTML, pixel dimension etc. Today, CMS, Content Management System, is a control panel for updating your website that theoretically knows all these programs/online concepts which then can assist a non web-graphics DIY person to update their site every second … or does it?
Any web designer can agree thatthe idea of updating a clients bio pic for the 5th time on the 11th hour before “going live” is not appealing, “here you do it”. However the crickets you hear when you tell that client that the “pixel dimension of their bio picture is what is making the site crash” does not sound any better, “plz shoot me”.
To successfully maintain your content, two phases must occur before you press that publish button:
Phase 1 What the heck are you going to say? and
Phase 2 How are you going to say IT? (tweet it, blog it, obnoxiously post it on all your Facebook friends wall?)
The “what” is what is called in social media land, content strategy. For example, even thou their are sites like NYTimes that publishes their “content” to the minute (…they have a staff of how many?) majority of their departments (Fashion, Style, Travel) have content done weeks in advance. How you say? Because they have a strategy to the content they are going to published laid out for the year. And with that strategy comes the highly caffeinated staff that photographs it, writes it, edits it, uploads it, post it and event tweets it. With your handy dandy content management system, there is still just you. The cms won’t make the content for you.
But lets say you have a staff or you are ridiculously rich rss’ing eveyone else’s content for free (Huffington Post). You still have to figure out “how” you are going to deliver this content via the web. Will you have a XML slideshow, Youtube Video player, 1000+ blog post that needs pagination, commenting, archiving, retweet button with a Facebook share and rockets shooting out?
Today CMS’ing is like driving a car without knowing where you are going and what a road even is. Most websites turn into a real big bad car accident with the content everywhere and the website layout all broken up into pieces (similar to what happened Myspace, ironically).
So should you CMS or not? Three things are for sure:
one you need to update your website content constantly to stay competitive
two your content won’t create itself
three the cms will not always make aesthetically correct decisions for your website layout
So if you still want to DIY it, read up on how to create a content strategy for yourself AND take an HTML class..to start. But do understand that a human is still needed to update your site with good content in a visually appealing way. If the Content Management System could do that for you with a press of one button, then computers are running the world and we are all hooked to a network where we are the battery… or are we?