CMS Web Design. Scratching The Surface

With a CMS, it becomes very difficult for content assets to be on the site accidentally. Any updates must pass through commissioning, creation and one or more predefined sign off steps before the system will publish it. The resulting audit trail provides accountability for each action.

Many sites are operated by a team distributed between offices, companies or even countries and notifying a participant of an assigned task becomes more complicated than calling across the room. The CMS could notify a participant by email, by SMS (mobile phone text messaging), by fax or even by auto-generated letter. Because all the major tools have a web interface, participants can perform their task and view its results from anywhere with web access. And with a sensible CMS security model, you can be sure that only authorized people can perform authorized tasks.

You can specify dates and times for the content to go live and be archived or removed, along with the contents target audience segments. You can also impose review dates to ensure that information is not simply left on the site to rot until a new product replaces it. The responsible area will need to rubber stamp the content as still valid, commission a replacement or archive/delete it. If content is removed or archived, the CMS will ensure that the remaining content is still structurally consistent, without leaving orphaned links to the deleted asset. Speed to market

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When you have a CMS, you suddenly have a tremendous advantage in the time it takes to react to market intelligence. You can write, edit and publish updates in a matter of minutes without suffering from "Web Master Bottleneck". If your product globally propagates a virus, updates at this pace could be essential.

Alternatively, you take the decision that the visual design isn't working on a Monday morning, and can have a new design implemented by Wednesday. Why? Because your CMS is maintaining the site's structure, content and visual presentation in separate layers (see Figure 1, below), and will pour your content and its structure into a few visual templates.

Similarly, you can restructure a site, merging and splitting areas, without substantial manual intervention, as this layer is also maintained separately. Reduced maintenance costs

By automating the building of pages on your site, you will cut substantial sums from the site's maintenance costs. A reasonably content rich site could need 250 or more updates a day, each averaging around 2 man-hours to produce and test. As a Web Publisher with the competence to get the edits right and not break the site will cost from $150-$200 per day, you could be cutting $12,000 from your bottom line every working day.