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Be sure to have a logical system and keep those file sizes down! This is where metadata come into the picture. Metadata are fields and values that are used to tag, categorise, and describe your content. If your CMS is the library and your content the books, metadata can be seen as the filing system and corresponding labels.

Metadata helps with the following:. Some advanced CMSs may include a ton more fields to fill out, like vanity URLs, redirect rules, on and off times, and much more.

Whether these myriad of fields are optional or not depends on what your developers have decided and what is possible in the CMS. Facebook or LinkedIn. The point of all this tagging and categorising is to optimise your website for search engines, also known as search engine optimisation, or SEO.

SEO is a complex field where many experts will have their say, and to make matters even more complicated, SEO is ever-evolving. Google is the most famous search engine and always modifies its search algorithms to make searches better, more precise, and more relevant for the end users. The ability to create web pages with web pages in the Internet browser does probably not impress neither you nor your organisation as it might have done in While web content management is a must, users today expect something more of a CMS; they expect it to also provide a solution for marketing automation.

Marketing automation is a common designation for tools that all contribute to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time — all by an automated process based on user behaviour and data analytics. You, the marketer, produce the content and define some key parameters, before unleashing the automated machine on website visitors, email readers, and social media users.

Today some CMSs provide integrated marketing automation tools, while others offer integrations through plugins or apps. The goal is to send editorial content to other platforms and devices where traditional desktop or mobile web browser visuals do not apply.

However, for our purposes here we will talk about the design and the content as one side each of the same coin that is the website — wherein the coin-flipping hand is the CMS. The CMS, especially if it is a traditional or a decoupled CMS where you can choose when and where to make it headless, executes both the form and the style, just like you decide the spin and trajectory of the coin when tossing it. What does this mean? Well, yes, but one thing is to ornament your skyscraper with nice fronts, touches and details, but what decides the blueprint and the support beams for the building itself?

The architecture. And the architecture in our digital marketing world is the database and CMS itself; it lays out the guidelines and the basics, whereupon HTML the structure and CSS the layout add some finishing touches, albeit nice and necessary ones at that. The same principle applies to responsive and adaptive design.

When considering a CMS you should be aware of the structure and hierarchy of content in the back-end. Keep in mind how the seemingly internal rules of a CMS in regard to the structuring of your various pages and files most likely have a direct impact on the possibilities of how you can set up your website and how it looks.

If you are on the lookout for a new CMS for your organisation, make sure it offers you flexibility in how you set up your entire site, with full control over the tree structure, category organisation, content type allocation, and so on. A template is a quick and easy way to make a professional looking resume in a text editor program or a gorgeous slideshow in a presentation program, but templating also applies to websites. Your chosen CMS should offer a way to template both entire pages and individual modules or elements within pages.

Templating makes it easy to switch the looks of your site, but also to implement new functionality fast and easy, as this only involves changing one parameter instead of copy-pasting long lines of HTML. Setting up and quality checking different templates is a way to make your content compliant with both brand guidelines and technical requirements.

Support for templating makes the running of a website not only flexible for the site as a whole, but also for all the modular parts, which you can use, re-use, and cross-use all over the site in a matter of seconds.

A quick checklist for design considerations should be in order. A design-friendly CMS should enable you to:. With the advent of smarter and more flexible technology, the world of CMS has witnessed the rise of design systems. A design system may ensure brand compliance across digital experiences, and can be defined as follows:. A design system maintains in one place the visual and functional elements of an organisation, fulfilling its brand principles through design, realisation, and development of products and services.

A design system is more than a brand repository—it is a system with both guidelines and ready-made code to deliver visuals and functionality into your digital experiences through a CMS. The contents of a design system can be used by your editors, designers, and developers in diverse, but brand compliant presets on your website or app. The design system may include the following contents:. There are different types of design systems, varying from strict and centralised to loose and distributed:.

Whether or not your organisation should use a design system in conjecture with your CMS depends on your specific needs. Do you e. See also: Best practices for building a design system ». We mentioned that the ordering of website pages in a CMS is instrumental to the looks and feeling of your finished product. Most people probably like to keep some semblance of order and tidiness in their homes, minds, and daily chores.

Why should the tool for your online digital experiences be any different? Any great CMS keeps your content in an orderly fashion, with a clear-cut hierarchy of folders and files giving you a sense of context. The purpose of order, context, and hierarchy is to enable you and your co-workers to easily browse and retrieve published and unpublished content, as well as getting an overall picture of what task your site is supposed to fulfil. How you organise your site is entirely up to you or your organisation , but your chosen CMS should at least feature the following functionality in regard to site hierarchy:.

Are there any general advice for best practice when it comes to organising your content within the site hierarchy? It all depends on what you need. If your CMS has a great search function or even an enterprise search , tight hierarchical organisation for browsing purposes might not be necessary. Some CMSs use a separate, silo-esque method of uploading, storing, and retrieving images in the same complex of folders and subfolders, but again, a good search function renders this unnecessary.

If you only would like to get an overview of your website offering, maybe a XML sitemap will do the trick instead of rigid structuring in the CMS. This is closely related to the site hierarchy, as in most CMSs you need to set up pages and subpages in the same way they will appear in the address bar, also known as the URL. For instance, say you work for a bank that has a topic page about investing, with subpages about stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. To achieve this logic under normal circumstances, you need to place all the three subpages under the topic page in the CMS site hierarchy:.

What are those? In short, a vanity URL is a unique web address that is shortened to fit a marketing or usability purpose.

An example may be as follows:. The purpose is to make URLs for important pages shorter and easier to remember, while keeping the original site structure in one piece. If content is king, then timing is queen. Together, this royal couple can make or break a marketing strategy, and as you probably would have the king and queen make your strategy a success rather than a failure, you not only need to pay attention to content, but to timing as well — i.

Back in the days of yore all kinds of organisations controlled when their ads, marketing material, and information brochures were distributed — when content were sent out with the postal service, when it was displayed in the newsstands, when invitations to events were distributed. This need of timely control has not evaporated with the emergence of digital technology.

You need to reach the right audience with the right message at the right time. Hence, most content management systems give you advanced control of drafting, publishing, unpublishing, republishing, on and off times, as well as detailed control over the publish date down to minutes and seconds.

Being able to plan and schedule content in the future enables you to have a steady flow of content, e. The ability to schedule content on a point of time when nobody in your team is available, but when your readers are most readily available to dive into it, is also a nice perk to have in mind.

This function basically decides when a specific piece of content will be available and when it will not. Say, for instance, that your task is to organise dozens of events, and every event has its own page. Another example may be a seasonal event, say, a branded summer campaign. Most organisations have a hierarchy, i. A CEO is higher in the hierarchy than a janitor, and the former has more executive power and insights into all the statements and records of the organisation than the latter.

The transferring of this principle to a CMS makes sense: Some coworkers have more responsibility than others, and yet others have a specific, technical function no one else in the organisation can replace. A person hired to write copy should not have access to change the structure of the website, an editor should not have access to change the codes behind the website, while a developer should have full access to all levels to code and quality check the test results in all facets, and so on.

Any CMS with respect for itself and the security of its customers have the possibility to manage users and roles. Roles vary depending on your needs, but common roles include:. Your chosen CMS should provide you with an overview where you can fully control who gets to see and do what of tasks in the system. Who has the right to change code? Who has the right to rearrange the page hierarchy? Who has the right to only write articles?

The user role control panel should help you decide. You discover a most grievous mistake in one of your articles; a paragraph with a well written and thoroughly reasoned arguments have accidentally been deleted. And worse yet: the content was deleted several days ago! If this was the late 90s and your software was a text editing program, your carefully executed lines of text would now be gone forever. With the advent of services like Wikipedia and Google Docs, a version history is now always present.

Every time you save changes in Wikipedia or do anything in a Google Doc, the system saves the previous version at the same time it both saves and publishes the new and current version.

Make sure that your CMS includes this feature, as you always can go back in history to find any given edition of your content, no matter how far back in time, and either bring it all back in its full retro glory or pick snippets to re-include in your current, live web page. Revisions are an inbuilt security mechanism for your content, and ensures that you never lose progress. It is also a form of audit, which you can use to quality check all published content over time and observe what actually did occur in the past.

In some ways revisions are audit logs in a way similar to blockchain, used in e. Publishing and bringing back lost content is one thing, but knowing and having full control over live versions and changes to it is another matter. When you have published content in some CMSs, all the following edits are made live on the fly.

But what if you want change certain elements, but postpone the publishing to a later date? If this is an important issue to you, make sure your chosen CMS includes the possibility to not only publish and saving changes to published content before updating live, but also to make this distinction crystal clear to you in the user interface.

Accessibility is the principle that sight or hearing impaired people should be able to see and hear the contents of your website and navigate it easily. The more people who can consume your content, the merrier — and the same principle applies to your producers: the more who can use the CMS, the better.

If the CMS fulfils accessibility standards, it also enables any person to contribute to your website. This is a technical specification by the World Wide Web Consortium W3C , specifying how you can increase the accessibility of your web pages. Certain functions of modern websites with dynamic content and advanced user interfaces are not available for people with disabilities.

As this is a page about CMS, we concentrate on the latter. How accessible is your CMS, and how easy is it to use? Of course, a lot more could be said and written about UX. You should see this as a start, and not as a detailed investigation about how you can think about usability and accessibility in your chosen CMS. We now know what a content management system is and what you could do and should do with it. But where is the CMS headed? What is the future for the technology?

In the s most organisations and persons with an online presence made their websites by hard-coding static HTML pages. By the late s progress in programming languages enabled developers to make site owners and editorial teams to edit content on their own websites.

This gave way for the birth of the content management systems. A CMS allowed users to write, copy, upload images and publish to the web without being especially knowledgeable about technical stuff. In the early s several open-source CMSs began to appear, increasing in popularity together with the commercial, proprietary CMSs all the way up to present day. In the late s and early s user needs changed from just being able to produce and publish on the web to include more rich marketing abilities and features, as well as addressing the issue of multichannel presence.

This is where we are today. The development of content management systems has certainly not been standing still since the s, but what can we expect for the next decade? Historically, local deployments have dominated the CMS arena. With the rapidly rising popularity of cloud , CMS vendors have started to offer their software as a service SaaS , effectively reducing the complexity of deployments and hosting.

Vendors that have previously been pure software companies are now offering their solutions as a service. Be careful when choosing your solution, as proprietary cloud -only offerings will lock you in compared to software-based solutions and especially open source systems. The future of CMS will still remain closely aligned with the web. However, the number of devices and interfaces we use to consume and interact with content has exploded: social media, apps, watches, speech interfaces, virtual and augmented reality, and digital signage are just the tip of the iceberg.

There are numerous ways to feed these sources with content, but for any organisation looking to provide consistent content across channels, the answer is summarised in three letters: API application programming interface.

Content served through APIs will primarily be structured like in atomic content design , simply meaning layout and actual presentation needs to be handled by each client and device.

Clients must be able to retrieve content through well defined APIs, and we can expect to see many different styles of APIs — but web-based APIs will dominate completely. Traditional CMS vendors are also providing web APIs for their content, and this is often referred to as a decoupled approach. To learn more about the topic, read this article on headless vs.

The riveting technological development of the web, in both software and hardware, leaves a lot of uncertain factors about the immediate and the more distant future of CMS. But this seems to be fairly certain: Several CMS vendors have moved beyond simple web content management , and many already offer a wide range of marketing tools or integrated marketing suites. In these marketing package solutions we can observe an increased focus on tools for personalisation and dynamic, contextual marketing — as well as marketing automation and continuous optimisation of the user and customer experience.

This means a lot of different tools and services , available through several different platforms and channels, and aimed at different segments of audiences — the right content at the right time to the right people. You can expect these solutions to be available primarily as cloud-based services.

Ever since Steve Jobs introduced the original iPhone in , the Internet has been divided in how it is presented: Usually this manifests in a brand offering being presented as a regular website in a desktop browser and as a dedicated app on iOS, Android, etc.

This two-fold or x-fold solution has proven both time consuming and resource intensive: developers basically have had to make the same product twice, thrice or even more. The multi-platform approach is a waste of time and can be confusing and frustrating for the end-users. Why is functionality x present in the desktop version of the website, but not in the app? And vice versa. February 1, at pm. DrGartland says:. March 25, at am. Leave a Reply Name required Email required Message.

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Prototype Model Definition: The Prototyping Model is a Systems Development Methodology SDM within which a paradigm output or an early approximation of a final system or product is constructed, tested, and then reworked. It is majorly a trial-and-error process which works in an iterative fashion.

Description: There are many steps within the Prototyping Model: 1. New system requirements or expectations of the system output are outlined in as much detail as possible. This requires interviewing variety of users, representing all the segments or stakeholders of the prevailing system.

A preliminary layout specification is formed for the new system. A first output model of the new system is made from the preliminary layouts.

This is often a scaled-down system which tentatively gives an approximation of the desired output required. The users check the primary output, noting its strengths and weaknesses, the things which need to be carried ahead in the next steps and the things which need to be discarded. The developer collects and examines the remarks from the all the stakeholders. The first paradigm is changed, supported by the comments provided by the users, and is shaped to a second output of the new system.

The second output is evaluated in the same manner as was the primary output. These steps are reiterated persistently, till the users are satisfied with the output. The final system is hence constructed, supported by the ultimate output. The final system is completely evaluated and tested. Routine maintenance is administered on a seamless basis to forecast large-scale failures and to reduce the time period. In disparity to the waterfall model, which emphasizes meticulous specification and planning, the RAD approach means building on continuously evolving requirements, as more and more learnings are drawn as the development progresses.

Description: RAD puts clear focus on prototyping, which acts as an alternative to design specifications. The RAD model includes agile method and spiral model. Below phases are in rapid application development RAD model: 1.

Business modeling: The information flow is identified between different business functions. Data modeling: Information collected from business modeling is used to define data objects that are required for the business.

Process modeling: Data objects defined in data modeling are converted to establish the business information flow to achieve some specific business objective process descriptions for adding, deleting, modifying data objects that are given. Application generation: The actual system is created and coding is done by using automation tools. This converts the overall concept, process and related information into actual desired output. Testing and turnover: The overall testing cycle time is reduced in the RAD model as the prototypes are independently tested during every cycle.

However, the overall flow of information, user interfaces and other program interfaces, and coaxials between these interfaces and the rest of data flow need to be tested as per acceptance process.