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| Tips and Tricks - What to look for in a CMS |
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Welcome to Inzen's Tips and Tricks section. Every month, we will be updating this page to give you some valuable and interesting information to help you give your organisation the best advice for maximising the value of your online presence. This month, we are illustrating a few things to look out for when selecting a Content Management System (CMS).
What is a Content Managment System?
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A Content Managment System (CMS) is simply a piece of software that allows you, the business staff members, to completely control all the content of your website without requiring assistance from any third parties. That means you could change the text on pages, add new pages, add pictures and links, change colours and so on at any time you like without needing to liaise with any designers, technicians or hosting companies. For more information on why it's so beneficial to use a CMS, click here.
| What to look for in a CMS |
Being able to edit your site from anywhere, quickly
There are a number of CMS's out there. But do they really serve the purpose you're looking for? A CMS is supposed to save you time, save you money and increase your sales. An important component of that is being able to use your CMS as soon as you want to, no matter where you are.
To do this, you need a ASP (Application Service Provider)- model CMS - that simply means that all of the tools you need are available over the internet.
Secondly, it needs to be very quick and easy to use. Many CMS's out there are cumbersome, and require technical knowledge to operate. This completely negates the point of having a CMS - to allow the non-technical staff of an organisation to market their business through their online presence.
Lastly, the changes must go live instantly. Any delay in publishing your updates result in a lag in your ability to promote your business, which means lost revenue.
Newsletter functionality
 There are two ways to market your business online - passively and actively.
Passive marketing means having a professional website that is easily found by search engines, such as Google (see Frames and non-friendly URLS below for more detail)
Active marketing means sending out professional email newsletters to keep your market up to date on your business' products and services, and also to keep you fresh in their mind.
There are many systems out there claiming to help your business through email newsletters, but the majority of them fall down in a number of ways:
- Forwarding
The email newsletters must be able to be forwarded without degrading. Referral or viral marketing can be the most effective, especially since it's free. If your clients cannot forward your email newsletters without their integrity breaking, then you are losing a massive slice of potential market.
- Size
Many organisations and CMS's send email newsletters that are far too big, resulting in a long download time, being rejected by mail servers and firewalls, and frustration for the end-user. At the end of the day, people want to be able to receive information quickly and smoothly. When choosing a CMS with email functionality, ensure you see a demonstration of the newsletter functionality in action, how quickly it sends, and how rapidly you receive it.
- Click-through rates
Sending a 1000 newsletters may be good, but it makes it difficult to respond to your market if you don't know how many people are opening your emails, and what they actually found interesting. Ensuring that your email newsletters contain links back to your website gives you invaluable data on how your market is responding to your marketing, down to a granular level - how long did they take to open the email, what links did they click on, how long did they stay on your site, and so on. Linking back to your website also enables you to promote other important aspects of your organisation, rather than just what the end-user clicked on.
- Flexibility
Some organisations use email clients that do not display HTML newsletters well, such as Lotus Notes. Your CMS needs to be able to inform everyone, regardless of their email client, of your business' services. Make sure the CMS you choose can send text and HTML newsletters, dependant on the receiving party.
Frames or non-friendly URLS
There are many ways to build a website - tables, frames, database-driven CMS, and so on. As the Internet has evolved, and search engines like Google have become paramount for an effective website, there are a number of traps to avoid:
- Frames
Search engines do not like frames. The use of Frames was very popular 5-10 years ago, as they allowed reasonably non-technical users an easy method of creating a well-linked and dynamic, nested site. However, the technical methodology of frames prevents any automatic method of 'spidering' a site. Effectively, a Frames-based site can be an empty 'front', referencing back to pages on the web server that the end-user's computer cannot actually 'read'. This means that search engines land on a Frames-based site, and have no idea what the actual content of the site is. This was particularly popular with pornographic sites, and thus is now viewed with great suspicion by search engines. Thus, not only do the likes of Google not search Frames-based sites, they actually down-grade the ranking based on poor site design and lack of information.
- Non-friendly URLS
Many CMS's use a database behind the scene, which actually does all the hard work linking all the pages together. However, databases are generally non very user-friendly when it comes to figuring out good URLS (the actual web addresses of each page on your website). They will often have something like this (don't try to go to this link, it is made-up):
http://www.domain.com/db/ThisPage.asp?name=page&c=16&g=83&x=12
Search engines get confused by complicated strings like this, and will give up trying to search the content of your site immediately. When looking at a CMS, check the site addresses it has at the top, and if Google will be able to read them.
Website Statistics
 There's no point having a content management system, if you can't judge which areas of your website are performing well, and which aren't. A solid, integrated statistics mechanism gives your organisation the ability to monitor:
- what parts of the website people are looking at
- what days of the week and month they are visiting
- how times of the day they are visiting and for how long
- what search engines are 'spidering' you
- what people are searching for when they find you
- the countries people are in that are viewing your site
- and much more...
| Where can you find a good CMS? |
Kaboodle, Inzen's Content Management System, avoids all of the pitfalls mentioned above, and ensures your web presence makes your business money.
Kaboodle is a world-class CMS with 'anywhere anytime' ASP technology, an extremely easy to use interface, search engine optimisation, an online contact database and email newsletter marketing manager, website statistics and loads more.
To find out more...
To find out more about Kaboodle, either:
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