Web content management a process, not a project is a nice post by Gerry McGovern.
The gist is that if you treat your site as a project it will begin to age and get out of date the minute the “project” is completed. Treating your site as an ongoing management process helps to avoid some of those problems. However, it does take more time, resources and dedication than a one-off project, which is why many organizations don’t go that route.
(Spotted via Column Two.)
Below are a set of interview questions that we used when filling the Director of Content Management position in our office. I posted these to an ASAE list today in response to a question and thought I might as well throw them up here.
These are tailored for the mission and organizational culture at our office but might be useful for those of you who interview people for content management jobs, especially those positions that manage other staff and teams.
OPENING QUESTION
1. Why are you interested in applying for this position?
QUESTIONS
2. Please describe your view of the relationships between information architecture, graphic/html design, and content development. What challenges do you see in managing the roles and responsibilities within a team responsible for these areas?
3. What are some unique qualities about publishing health care information on the web as opposed to other types of content?
4. Please describe your style of leadership in the work you have done as a staff supervisor or team leader. How has your style of leadership contributed to the success of your projects?
5. Describe a situation where you facilitated a project that spanned across several departments or functions. What challenges did you face and how did you overcome them?
6. What are the unique qualities of publishing to the web compared to traditional print or broadcast media? How does the management of web activities compare to the others?
7. How have you positively impacted the careers of staff you have mentored or supervised? Please cite a specific example.
8. Describe the process of redesigning a website. Please give an example from your past work if you can.
9. How do you explain what works online and what doesn’t when you are working with someone who is not as experienced as you are with html and the Web?
10. Give us an example of an occasion when you found yourself with competing priorities – more to do than you could possibly get done. What did you do to resolve the situation? Would you do anything different now?
Came across these 12-year old stats recently:
Bad news I think…
1. If two groups of people construct thesauri in a particular subject area, the overlap of index terms will only be 60%.
2. Two indexers using the same thesaurus on the same document use common index terms in only 30% of cases.
3. The output from two experienced database searchers has only 40% overlap.
4. Experts’ judgements of relevance concur in only 60% of cases.
[Source: JAA Sillince, 1992, Literature searching with unclear objectives: a new approach using argumentation. On-line Review, 16 (6), 391-409]
I think that just goes to show that the quality and knowledge of your indexers (human or otherwise) is incredibly important.
James Robertson has posted a great high-level view of the pros and cons of going with an Open-source content management system instead of a commercial package.
James Robertson has published a concise review of the pros and cons of dynamic vs. batch publishing in web content management systems. He also covers the hybrid of the two, which is what we now have in place with our systems at work.
The major con under the dynamic system that I have experienced directly is the server load issue. Dynamic systems cannot scale up for additional traffic as efficiently as batch or hybrid systems. Authoring activities are very processor and database intensive operations. Mix a few active editors along with heavy end user traffic and your server may quickly succumb.
About 18 months ago, we were in the unenviable situation of limiting editing activities to a small number of staff during low-traffic time periods. Without those restrictions our site constantly crashed and/or timed-out due to the unmanageable load of end users and editors hitting a single server. Not a popular measure with staff, to say the least. The dynamic CMS we were using at the time eventually came out with an update that allowed us to move to the hybrid approach and lift our editing restrictions. Moving authoring to a separate server dramatically improved the stability of our production web site.
Does Personalization Do Anything Useful?
I interviewed user interface expert Jared Spool a couple of years ago for a now defunct Web site. I really like Jared’s ideas on all things technical, so it was a pleasure to discuss personalization with him.
Another take on personalization from a couple years ago. My favorite bit of the interview:
For Spool, the way to tackle personalization isn’t to start with the question, ?What can we personalize?? The right questions to ask are, ?What does the user need to see right now? What information does the user need??
Good Information Architecture Increases Online Sales
Information Architecture can be applied to resolve breakdowns in site design and navigation structure. The role of good Information Architecture is to make the Website work not in the technical sense, but from a functional, organized, conceptual perspective.
(Article found via InfoDesign.)
This article makes the point that organizations should use their site’s information architecture as a critical tool in acheiving their major organizational goals (sales, in this example). While that sounds obvious it is easy to drift away from that kind of objective if you don’t keep it firmly in mind during the design process.
At ASHA, we recently redesigned and restructured our web site. One of our goals was to strongly enhance the value of being a member and to ensure that members and prospective members could easily see the wealth of information they could recieve on the web site. To that end, we grouped all the member-only content into a single section with a drop-down menu that allows them to quickly see all the major content areas. Again, it seems an obvious approach but it is one we have not really taken before when the users’ perception of member value on the web site was not kept front and center during the design process. Without that focus it would have been very easy to compromise in other areas that would have diluted or fragmented the member-only content on our site.
This article by Gerry McGovern goes into a bit more detail on the Jupiter personalization report: Why personalization hasn’t worked. (Thanks to James Robertson for the link.)
Not surprisingly, the Jupiter report finds that personalized websites are four times more expensive to run. It also finds that personalized websites are twice as likely to attract visitors who will never pay for anything. Worse still, it finds that 25 percent of consumers actually avoid personalized websites because they fear that their personal information will be abused.
I contacted Jupiter about buying the report and they said it will be available for sale in about 8 weeks (I assume they are giving their subscribers a 2-month exclusive). It will show up on this site when it becomes available to the general, non-subscribing, public.
This is interesting: Report slams Web personalization | CNET News.com.
The main point of the Jupiter report, according to the article, is that personalization is so expensive in terms of technology and human capital that it rarely pays off for organizations that implement it. The report recommends improving navigation and search as a better investment than personalization. Makes sense to me.
Ideas in Technology and Publishing: Why Content Management Projects Succeed or Fail proposes some interesting factors that contribute to successful CMS deployments.
C. David Gammel, CAE 