University Business - April 2010 - (Page 27)

INTERNET TECHNOLOGY A ﬁve-step plan for evaluating web content management systems How to Select the Right CMS By Karine Joly H AVE YOU NOTICED HOW full your schedule has become? With tighter budgets, smaller teams, and an ever-growing list of responsibilities and possibilities, the typical workload for higher ed web professionals has dramatically increased. While the rising demands of social media and growing shift to the mobile web have put more pressure on web communication oﬃces, the institutional website is now even more central to the way universities and colleges communicate, inform, run, and “market” themselves to students. In this day and age of Facebook, Twitter, and the likes, college websites still weigh the most for prospective students. As the latest Noel-Levitz E-Expectations project report shares, 88 percent of 1,000 college-bound seniors surveyed said they would drop a school or be very disappointed if its website didn’t have the content they needed to make their decision. While 80 percent stated that web content is more important than site design, 57 percent said they would probably take a school oﬀ their list if the web content was out of date, incorrect, or unhelpful. So, can you remember the last time you updated your web pages? Are you sure your web content reﬂects the latest changes in admissions deadlines, ﬁnancial aid requirements, key staﬀ contact information, and all other crucial bits of information? Or, are you facing a backlog of web edit requests that needed to be done by ... yesterday? It’s time to stop drowning in outdated web content, start thinking about a better content management strategy for your website, and choose to invest in the right higher-than-anticipated implementation costs, longer timeframes to migrate existing website content to the CMS, or challenges managing the website using the CMS tool,” warns Doug Clark, principal at Collegiate Web Solutions, which helps institutions with CMS implementations. 2. Start with organizational goals and deﬁne how you will measure success. Once all the stakeholders are ready for the upcoming change, it’s very important to deﬁne goals and key performance indicators. “A CMS implementation is a time-consuming and expensive endeavor, and the institution should be crystal clear about what success looks like before it begins,” says Rob Cima, partner at mStoner, another ﬁrm that helps institutions with web redesigns and CMS projects. Usual measurable goals include reducing the amount of time necessary to create and deliver content by a certain percentage, putting communicators in control of online communications, maintaining user experience and brand consistency, and improving yield by a certain percentage via the creation of fresh content targeted at accepted students. 3. Get your homework done. Now is the time to learn as much as you can about both the content management system and your future CMS users as a group. You need to have a clear Karine Joly is the web editor behind www .collegewebeditor.com, a blog about higher ed web marketing, public relations, and technologies. She is also the founder of the professional development online community www.higher edexperts.com. April 2010 | 27 The software application should support the speciﬁc ways people currently work. web content management system (CMS) by following this ﬁve-step plan. 1. Get ready for a new web content management strategy. is will mean going from a centralized to distributed approach to web content management, which can’t be done overnight. Beyond new software, it requires a strategy addressing content ownership and approval processes among other things. At Marist College (N.Y.), the CMS selection process took about six months in 2008. e most interesting part of the decision cycle was caused by internal discussions about what was proposed and what the results would be. “ e biggest concern was that users would now be held responsible for their content,” recalls Bill irsk, vice president of information technology. Don’t skip this soul-searching step. It is crucial to get executive support and avoid issues down the road. “When a CMS evaluation doesn’t have a strategic foundation, the end result can be universitybusiness.com http://www.collegewebeditor.com http://www.collegewebeditor.com http://www.higheredexperts.com http://www.higheredexperts.com http://www.universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - April 2010

University Business - April 2010
Contents
Editor's Note
College Index
Company Index
Advisory Board
Behind the News
Sense of Place
Viewpoint
Financial Aid
Internet Technology
Certified for Safety
Managing the Enterprise on Limited Resources
A New Chapter for Campus Bookstores
Independent Outlook
What's New
End Note

University Business - April 2010