There are huge advantages to using a CMS, but some of these features also bring disadvantages.

As a Technical Director at AB&C, I'm mainly involved in the technical production for our web projects — from landing pages for specific campaigns to websites for hospital systems. For the last few years, we’ve been doing much of this production in a content management system (CMS), a web-based application that enables us to give our clients design templates that they can fill in with text and pictures.

There are huge advantages to using a CMS, such as out-of-the-box features like page/document management, search indexing, etc. But these features also bring downsides into play:

1.    Designing and building a site in a CMS requires a lot of overhead, which we accept because of the benefits down the line. For example, a CMS makes adding new pages easier and faster.

2.    While a CMS makes it easy to do things like add pages and edit text, it can make it difficult to modify designs or change how the site functions.

3.    Many of our clients aren’t comfortable editing their sites and either ask us to help or turn the whole thing back over to us. When we end up making the updates, we find ourselves wishing the CMS wasn’t there so we could just “make the changes directly” instead of spending time getting the CMS to do what we want.

4.    Pages created within a CMS using basic text and pictures tend to be boring and poorly formatted when viewed on a mobile device.

For large sites that are content-heavy and require multiple users to make changes, a CMS is a necessity and the costs are worth it. For sites that don’t have those requirements, a CMS can be a burden.

Performance

Due to the nature of the CMS, it can be difficult or impossible to do certain optimizations that affect the speed of the website.

Speed is important because search engines like Google ranks fast sites over slow sites. Google is all about making the web faster (the faster you browse, the more searching you’ll do; the more searching you do, the more ads they can sell — have you ever wondered why Google has its own browser?). So if all other factors were equal between website A and website B, the faster of the two is likely to receive a higher Page Rank. Website speed also affects consumer behavior. Even a slightly slower site can result in fewer conversions and higher abandon rates.

It also turns out that much of the real and perceived speed of a website doesn’t have to do with how fast the Internet connection or the servers are, which version of the latest browser you’re using, or even how fast your CMS is, but with how the web pages themselves are constructed.

There are some trivial and not-so-trivial techniques that ensure web pages load as quickly as possible, and working around a CMS can put some of these out of reach.

So what?

Because of the four downsides mentioned above as well as the performance aspect, we’ve been choosing more frequently not to use a CMS. It’s often overkill for the website at hand, and without it we can make changes to the site more quickly and further optimize some of the technical components that help pages load faster. We can respond more quickly to change requests from our clients, it’s faster to make basic edits to the text, and the faster page load speed is appreciated by visitors and search engines alike.

An example

We recently built a website for an international commercial truck manufacturer. It seemed like a good candidate for a CMS: it is mostly a set of pages, it needed to be available in multiple languages and it had regularly changing content (press releases).

We chose to build the site without a CMS and bolt in basic CMS-like functionality for some key areas like press releases. The end product was a hybrid: content editors can manage press releases and dealer information, but the landing pages and other marketing content stays with the designers.

We addressed the four downsides:

1.    Overhead and costs are lower.

2.    It’s easy to adjust designs and functionality.

3.    Content can be changed quickly.

4.    Content is presented in more compelling way across all devices.

And the site is super-quick with sub-second page loads, pages and content optimized for search engines and every other trick we could find to make the site as fast as possible.

What does this mean for you?

For your next web project or website update, consider whether or not you really need a CMS. Maybe you should let your web/marketing team or agency handle that for you. I know — it’s tough to let go of that control. But the solution will probably be more portable and easier to change, the costs will likely be the same (or lower), and your website will be faster and present its content in a more compelling way. Most important, you’ll be able to focus less on making edits and more on your core business.

Is Twitter dead?

Every once in a while you’ll see an article asking “Is Twitter Dead?” even suggesting that if you’ve been avoiding Twitter as part of a “non-strategy,” it may be paying off!

The problem with that perspective is that Twitter is not a strategy. It’s not even a tactic. It’s a channel!

The strategy (and ultimately your goal) is usually specific to your organization so it’s hard to discuss. But we can identify a general growing audience: people who create and consume information, wherever and whenever, with increased frequency, increased brevity and often with groups of people (as opposed to one other person).

Think about how different that is from something that predates even e-mail: writing letters.

Letters were typically infrequent, long, tied to a physical location and timetable, and were exchanged between two individuals. We’re at the exact opposite of that now with text messages, status updates and micro-blogging in general.

As marketers, we need to be comfortable in these mediums so we can reach these consumers. Strategies to accomplish this include:
* Increase the frequency of communication with your brand consumers
* Drastically decrease the length of each communication
* Use more conversational language
* Enable consumers to respond or participate in the conversation
* Enable consumers to do this wherever they choose (e-mail, web, mobile phone, etc.)

Now, three questions: how much of your audience wants to communicate this way, what channel do they want it on and what information are they interested in?

Answer those questions and you’re on your way to some solid tactics.

One of those tactics may involve Twitter — a good channel to address the strategies above. But if Twitter dies, it doesn’t mean you were wrong, it just means people are moving to a different micro-blogging channel, and you should find out what that is and get involved.

Watch out for marketers who don’t have a firm grasp on the difference between goals, strategies, tactics and channels. Misunderstanding these components of a marketing plan can lead you down the wrong path.

Applying strategy is critical to social media success.

99 ways to use Twitter?

There are plenty of articles on the Internet that outline the 17 ways to use Twitter or the 32 ways to use Facebook. If your approach to social media has been to start with these types of articles, you may be focusing too quickly on tactics without an appropriate social media strategy. Tactics without a strategy are particularly bad because they often end up being ineffective, hard to measure and mask real opportunities a more strategic version of the tactic may provide.

Because social media tools are so accessible and seemingly easy to use, a planning/strategy phase is often skipped, perhaps also in part because the realm of social media seems so complex. Because there is no clear place to begin, there is a tendency to start with tactics, a fatal mistake.

How to approach the problem

One technique for approaching a problem that seems complex is to break it down into a series of simpler problems. This is a great approach when it comes to the social media landscape. Instead of looking at a list of 50 ways to use Twitter, it makes more sense to look at a smaller list of ways to use social media in general.

Such a list might look like this.

In fact, you’ll find that any social media strategy probably consists of several of the leaf nodes in this diagram being used in various channels. (For the purposes of this discussion, a social media “channel” is Facebook or a blog or Twitter).

Your challenge then is to identify:

1. the kind of information your organization has or can generate, ideally something conversational
2. the types of people you’re trying to reach through social media
3. the items from the diagram above that can be used to put that information from step (1) in front of those audiences in step (2)
4. the appropriate channel for each item in step (3)

Now, just because we have a plan of attack doesn’t mean this is necessarily an easy or straightforward task. The best social media strategies look easy in hindsight but have usually been cooked up with some outside-the-box thinking. The above map is not a magic wand, but it is a starting point.

Examples, please!

Let’s look at a real-world example. Imagine your real estate agent. There may be a temptation for him to jump straight to tactics and use Twitter to post listings. After all, he has listing information (this is his product) and Twitter is easy to sign up for. Plus, this is on the map under Sales/Marketing --> Product announcement. We’re in good shape, right?

Well, Sales/Marketing on the diagram has a red flag on it. That red flag means if you’re only using something from that category, you may be on the wrong track. In this case, our real estate agent’s listings probably aren’t that useful to most people (who only wants to see the listings from a single real estate agent?), it’s not very conversational (what would people say back to him about a listing?) and he’ll probably find he won’t get a lot of followers.

Even worse would be to have a Facebook page where he is re-posting the exact same listings. Now he has a situation where even if a person were to be interested in those listings, it’s not in their interest to follow him on Twitter and be a fan on Facebook because then they’ll just get the same information twice. As silly as that sounds, we see this all the time.

Lesson learned: Directly promoting your product or service on as many social media channels as possible is not a good strategy because it abuses your potential followers and misses the whole “social” part of social media. You’re not listening, you’re just talking. And you’re saying the same thing in multiple places. And nobody cares.

This can take many forms including using Twitter to post links to your press releases or using Facebook to post links to your blog posts. I’m not suggesting never doing that but only doing that puts you in the PR category on the diagram and it, too, has a red flag. Oops.

Okay, give me a better idea.

This real estate agent has a problem, however… Aren’t the listings the only content he has? Possibly, but remember the first step is to identify the kind of information your organization has or can create. The listings may be the only content he has at hand. Grabbing whatever information you already have and using social media as a one-way channel (outward) is a missed opportunity.

This is where the strategizing comes in. What about creating a tips/tricks list for homeowners? (See the map above under Educational --> Tips/Tricks). This could include reminders to disconnect your plastic hose fittings in the winter so they don’t crack or money-saving tips for efficient energy use. Maybe it’s one tip a week and every once in a while he throws in a property listing (Sales/Marketing --> Product announcement) or an open house announcement (Notifications --> Events/Reminders).

Now this real estate agent has something useful he is providing to his clients. All of his existing clients would potentially be interested and he’d stay top of mind when they’re looking to sell or buy or even just make a referral to somebody else: “You should use my real estate agent. I follow him on twitter and he’s got great homeowner tips.” This takes the form of branding (Topics/Issues --> Brand related) and on top of that, he gets his listings and open houses in the mix. He’s now using five concepts from the diagram!

Plus, followers who have tips of their own can reply to him which means (a) the rest of his followers benefit from the tip (“Comments” from the Social category on the diagram) and (b) he can file it away later to use next year (a form of Research on the diagram). Wow – we’ve got seven nodes covered on the diagram, only a couple are red-flagged and a real social media strategy is taking form!

Hopefully you can see the difference this approach can make. Obviously there are issues like staffing and creative elements and ongoing maintenance and monitoring but try this process with your organization or give us a call and we can walk you through it.

The browser wars are back on!

Remember the browser wars of the late nineties? Half the online population thought “Netscape” actually was the Internet and Microsoft was just starting to take the Internet seriously.

Of course, Internet Explorer emerged the victor and whether you’re in the camp that faults Microsoft’s heavy-handed tactics or the camp that recognizes Netscape’s failure to innovate, there’s probably some truth in both.

But now the war is back on. Except it’s not a browser war, it’s a “rendering engine” war.

What’s a rendering engine?
So, a browser is a program on your computer that you use to access websites. You probably know this and that may seem simple but Google went to the streets recently and found many people don’t grasp that concept.

But the browser program is fundamentally just the window, the menus and buttons, your bookmarks, etc. What’s really running the show is the part of the browser that actually displays or “renders” the website, and that is called the rendering engine.

Internet Explorer’s rendering engine is called “Trident.”

From Netscape’s ashes sprung a rendering engine called “Gecko.” That’s what’s inside Firefox for the rapidly growing population of Firefox users out there (me included).

So those are two major browsers, er, rendering engines, in use. But what about Apple’s Safari? And the new kid on the block, Google Chrome? Two more browsers? Kind of. They both actually use the same rendering engine: an open-source software project called “WebKit.”

Each of these rendering engines is updated from time to time so we have different versions and frankly, these different rendering engines make it very difficult to develop websites and software for the web!

They are all supposed to work in roughly the same way but they each have their quirks and nuances and it’s often difficult to get them all to behave the same way. Particularly when your goal is to work on some of the older versions.

Let’s get back on topic: The first browser war was about features. The rendering engine wars are about performance. For the sake of accessibility, however, let’s keep the rendering engine in mind but switch back to talking about browsers because rendering engines just aren’t what people use directly.

This performance war centers around online web applications like Google Maps, Apple’s Mobile Me service, Facebook and countless others. To provide the interactive interfaces you’ve come to expect from these types of websites, the rendering engine in your browser needs to be able to work very quickly on things like “DOM parsing” and “JavaScript execution,” technical terms for “making stuff happen.”

When the rendering engine can’t keep up, things tend to be a little slower to transition — you might see animation that isn’t as smooth as it should be or other hesitations that detract from the task you are trying to accomplish.

Given Firefox’s rapid growth in market share, its ability to be extremely competitive (if not always the fastest) when it comes to performance and its add-on ecosystem, it’s hard not to crown it the best all-around browser.

Chrome and Safari seem to hang on primarily because they both use the same rendering engine, which by all accounts is well written from a software engineering perspective (the same engine also powers the iPhone browser); plus they have some niche markets like Macintosh users and Google junkies.

And what about Internet Explorer? In my opinion, it’s got the worst rendering engine. It has the most quirks, the worst performance, the worst standards compliance and the most “versions” in use. Don’t get me wrong — we develop web software almost exclusively on Microsoft’s platform so I’m not a Microsoft hater. But I’m also not an apologist: Their browser’s rendering engine sucks! They like to say you have to use a slow-motion camera to see the difference between their browser loading a page and some “other” browser loading the same page. But it’s not about loading CNN.com today. It’s about loading an immersive and interactive “search-as-you-type CNN.com news interactive web application” tomorrow. And I don’t mean tomorrow next year. I mean tomorrow tomorrow.

So the good news is that there is renewed competition in this space and while that’s a royal pain for web developers like myself, it’s good news for the future of the interactive web.

A unified communication and collaboration tool

What do email, instant messaging, forums and ticketing systems have in common?

They are all mechanisms that two or more people can use to send communication back and forth. The primary differences between each is the number of people participating, the medium in which the messages exists, the speed with which the messages are delivered and the mechanism by which a user is notified of changes.

Email and instant messaging often have a dedicated medium (users of both typically run a special program like Outlook or Mac Mail) and generally happen between two people. A key difference is that email is asynchronous and instant messaging is synchronous. Instant messaging also notifies the user, well, instantly, and e-mail is a bit less “in your face.” But they share the features of a contact list and the ability to exchange text and images.Forums and ticketing systems are usually accessed with a web browser and have small to large groups participating. Forums typically require you to visit them to see new content, but often provide a way to be notified by email or through an automated “feed” that you can subscribe to. A ticketing system is used to track “issues” — where a trail of communication is stored as it tracks the status changes of the issue. If you’ve ever used a help-desk system or a bug-tracking system, you’re familiar with this concept.

Now comes Google Wave. Google Wave recognizes that these systems share 90% of the same core functionality. It then generalizes these concepts, places all the different types of messages in one location (the “Wave”) and brings the interaction with the content all under one roof (the web browser).

Imagine being able to write an email to another individual and then, as that person logs onto their computer and opens the Wave, you seamlessly switch to an instant messaging conversation — while at the same time adding two more people to the discussion. This is done while keeping the different types of messages in the same place with the full history of the conversation saved all without switching applications!

Is it e-mail? Kind of. You are sending messages back and forth.

Is it instant messaging? Sorta. When other people are online, messages become shorter and are exchanged in real time.

Is it a forum? Might as well be. All the messages are saved in a threaded view so the full history of the conversation can be reviewed at any time.

And yet, it’s all in one place accessed with one application with mechanisms for notifying you of changes.

The next beautiful part of the Wave is that it is a protocol. What does that mean? It just means that the concept and how it works is just an idea, albeit a very specific idea with rules about how it works — and Google is hard at work implementing it — but an idea nonetheless.

This means that just like e-mail and forums now, you don’t have to put all your eggs in the Google or Microsoft basket. You can participate in a Wave regardless of where it lives. A technical support Wave for your laptop might be hosted by Dell. Your daily conversation Waves would be hosted by your Internet Service provider or your employer (like e-mail is today).

All you need is nearly any modern web browser and all the Waves you participate in are aggregated together in one place for you. You get notified as changes are made and participate in the Waves by adding messages and media.

Web 2.0 ushered in social content and the ability to connect different applications to each other.

Web 3.0 may be marked by enhancements to these social media systems that are largely linked together through seamless collaboration like Google Wave.

I’m not suggesting that Google Wave is the end-all, be-all of online collaboration, but it’s a unique burst of innovation that is long overdue in this space and I’m very interested to see where we go from here. If you have some time on your hands, get the full details here: http://wave.google.com/