Does the person who has the biggest influence over choosing your CMS know HTML? Has he or she ever written code? Do they know what XML is? If so, then perhaps that person should not be the one taking the lead in making the decision.
Contrary to how most technology decisions are made, when it comes to a CMS, the users of the system ought to have a big say in what tool will work for them. Sure, features for system administrators and developers are important, but, not necessarily more important than usability.
One promise of CMS technology is enabling distributed authoring. In other words, you eliminate the IT bottleneck and let the people responsible for the content directly update and publish it. There’s huge benefit in taking the tech team out of the loop. The pitfall, of course, is partially losing control over what’s on the site to people who may or may not submit “good” content. This is why a CMS with a strong user interface and behind the scenes control is key.
Some thoughts on authoring and editing interfaces:
- So easy a 5th grader can do it? A good system provides an easy-to-use authoring and editing interface for non-technical users. Someone who knows how to do the basics in word processing software should be able to figure out how to edit content in the CMS without a week long training session.
- Is what you see really what you get? WYSIWYG editing is another common feature. In theory, this is the best kind of editing tool because most of us prefer to see what our content changes will do to the page as we make them. But, sometimes these types of editors add extra code to pages that cause errors, making the experience more frustrating than compelling.
- How does Times New Roman 14 pt. in lavender sound? Some CMS editing tools reinforce the rules of good design by using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Others do not. It’s great to let the users get in there and do the work themselves, but sometimes unleashed creativity needs to be tamed.
So, if you’re the one who’s leading the evaluation of a CMS, but you don’t represent the average user, what do you do? Fortunately, there’s a great solution. Many CMS tools provide evaluation versions of their software.
Try before you buy is now a viable option and highly recommended. It may take you a bit of time to set up and configure the trial software, but it gives you an opportunity to have various users take it for a spin while you watch for their reactions. It’s a great way to find out if the tool lives up to its promises…or if using it turns out to be “the pits”!
