[pre]designwebsite research, strategy & architecture

A web CMS: a system that manages web content. It sounded like a dream come true. But what they failed to mention is that the system simply facilitates the management of the content, not its creation. You solved a technical problem and created a human one– real people with little or no experience are now creating official institutional content on your behalf. Yikes!

Maybe that wasn’t such a great decision after all. You could, as Jeff Cram of the CMS Myth suggests, stop letting people use your CMS .

In his article, Jeff wrote:

“You have dozens of users in CMS tool 101 training sessions with no idea why they are there, no familiarity with the publishing model and no incentive to learn how to keep their piece of content up to date which rarely needs to be updated anyway. This never ends well.”

He also references another great article by Seth Gottlieb that makes a case for scaling back on distributed web authorship. Does this make any sense? The reason you bought a content management system (CMS) in the first place was to distribute the management of content to lots of people!

Jeff and Seth say that the promises of a website made better with a CMS are never quite realized because of “occasional users” — people who have little incentive or ownership of the site. I believe there is a great deal of truth to this, but feel the problems run even deeper. I see a lot of highly motivated CMS users churning out huge volumes of web garbage.

You have now created an organization full of incidental publishers.

Merriam Webster defines incidental as:

1 : being likely to ensue as a chance or minor consequence
2 : occurring merely by chance or without intention or calculation

How did you become a publisher?

Without intention? You didn’t intend to become a publisher, did you?

Perhaps it happened by chance (low woman/man on the totem pole, newest employee in the department, you have an iPhone).

And of course it’s a minor consequence (the last item on your job description calls this “other duties as assigned”).

It used to be so much easier. There was a webmaster. That person was, well, the master of the whole website—a jack-of-all-trades. Websites were smaller and the chief function was to create a place online to put all of the great stuff you created for some other purpose offline. It’s a bit larger and more complicated now, isn’t it?

Your Organization Needs Content Creators

Most of the organizations I’ve worked with consider themselves fortunate if they have 1 or 2 full-time employees devoted to web content.

Imagine a large research university with an operating budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars, thousands of employees and students on campus facilities that rival many medium-sized towns, trying to sell a $160,000 intangible product to a middle-income family– and just one full-time web content person. Phew!

Without completely restructuring the operation, the widely distributed management of a website is the only way they can manage it. Unfortunately, the way many of them distribute responsibility is incidental and haphazard. Change a few  job descriptions to include “doing the web”, train people on how to use the tool and *voilà* the website runs like a charm. HARDLY.

For the purposes of this conversation, let’s assume that most organizations have some sort of back-end technical support function for their sites (an IT department, a vendor, a web host, etc). There’s typically a budget for that. Leadership understands the need for it (and doesn’t understand how to do it so they’d gladly pay someone else).

That said, I want to focus on the other side—creating and maintaining useful content.

Who Creates Content?

Who does this stuff? While many people think it’s the role of a single webmaster (or a distributed group of departmental webmasters), the reality is that there are many roles that contribute to making content for the web.

Kristina Halvorson, in her book Content Strategy for the Web (p.73), identifies six types of people involved in content creation (with my take in parentheses):

Requesters submit requests for web content to be created, updated, or removed (These are the bosses who tell you to “get this up on the web”.)

Providers are subject matter experts who own and manage source content—or have the necessary information in their heads—that will be used by creators to develop web content (These are people closest to your product, service or audience who will likely run for the hills when you ask them to contribute website content!)

Creators are responsible for actually developing the content (This is anybody and everybody and rarely includes someone with professional communications training.)

Reviewers/ approvers must be consulted about some or all of the content prior to its publication online (These are usually the bosses who probably requested it in the first place. More likely than not, there is no reviewer at all. The untrained creator has total authority to do whatever she wants. It would be nice, however, if this function was served by a real editor with the authority to edit.)

Publishers get the content online, via coding, a content management system, a wiki, a blog, or other technical wizardry (These are the people with access to the CMS who are probably the creators, too. This is the one function that the organization usually provides some training and support for.)

Community Managers may be responsible for participating in online conversations via social media (You likely have far more of these than you know.)

And you thought all you needed to do was train your webmasters on the CMS!

Making Change

To really affect change in your organization and on your website, you have to involve a lot of people at all levels.

It may sound cliché—but it all starts with leadership. The leaders, whether they’re vice presidents or department directors, are also the requesters and the approvers. They don’t need to understand how you do what you do, but they do need to get why you do it so they will stop asking you to do stupid things! The incidental publisher is rarely in a position to defy the boss when told to get something up on the web.

So how can you really help those who create content for your website?

First of all, stop throwing out vague instructions like “keep your content fresh” and “promote interactivity”. People don’t know what that means and they’ll just waste time trying to do that.

And do not start and end your education with a “writing for the web” presentation or workshop. There’s nothing wrong with these (I have done many myself), but if it’s all you plan to do you might as well just call it “reformatting your garbage so it’s easier to scan”.

Here are a few things you should do:

• Begin by aligning and educating people at all levels of the organization. If you want people to change their behavior, you have to teach them. Don’t assume they all read the same blogs and books that you do. Introduce the basics. Make the knowledge real and applicable to their specific sites.
• Don’t stop with one presentation, but provide ongoing professional development. Many of you share your knowledge and experience with others at conferences, but rarely share that knowledge internally. Your incidental publishers may not have the opportunity to attend professional conferences and when they do, it’s likely in their functional area, not web-related.
• Be sure to cover the basics and details of your overall brand and messaging strategy, content strategy and editorial strategy
• Help them develop their own content and editorial strategies that align with the larger institutional strategies. If you don’t yet have an institutional strategy, do that first. You have to know where you’re going before you can direct others on how to get there.
• Make sure people know your organization’s business objectives and audiences and help them determine how their department’s objectives and audiences fit in the big picture.
• Teach them how to conduct simple audience research (i.e. talking to people) to find out what they need and want from your websites.
• Help jump start efforts one site at a time. Provide assistance with a content inventory (including the weeding and pruning of content), improve the architecture and rewrite some of their content. Basically, show them how it’s done.
• Help them understand the role of measurement and build-in simple, understandable ways to measure the effectiveness of their sites. Small, targeted measurements are much better than vague hit and page visit counts. Tie these measurements to their strategies.

None of this has to be done overnight. Baby steps in the right direction is progress. It will take a long time to change the culture—years perhaps. If people within the organization say this is too much work, is too hard or they don’t have enough time then perhaps they shouldn’t have their own websites at all.

I’m not saying this is easy. In fact, it may be very, very hard.  Your website IS your organization. In many cases a page deep within your site is the first and only contact people have with you.

You put your best foot forward in the products you develop, the courses you teach, the research you conduct and the services you provide, don’t you? Your expectations are high for your students, your employees, your faculty and your grantees, right? Why would your website, a reflection of all of that, be any different?

Your website is not an incidental responsibility—it is what you do and who you are. Its priority must reflect that.