With so many do-it-yourself tools for building and maintaining a website and even more possibilities when it comes to custom content management systems, it can be difficult to weed through the pros and cons and come to a conclusion on the best option for your business.
When it comes to site management and maintenance, there are three kinds of people.
Those who don’t want anything to do with their site management.
As far as you’re concerned, let someone else do it. You’re happy to pick up the phone and hire your web developer to make whatever changes you need.
Those who want complete control over their site.
You want to be able to change everything from the shades of green to the navigation, photos and copy. Your site is your own work of art.
Those who have no idea what they want, what they have time and budget for, how hard it will be or what to do about it.
You’d debate the pros and cons if you knew what they were, but there’s just too much information to process.
Whatever group you fit into, there are good reasons to manage your website, and good reasons not to. Here are some of the reasons why you do want to manage your own site content and how it can help your business run more efficiently.
You Have Inventory Or Other Content That Changes Frequently
By “frequently” we mean daily or weekly or some time interval that you wouldn’t want to pay for if it meant calling your web developer every five minutes. This is usually the case with ecommerce sites where product inventory can change at a moment’s notice, pricing is flexible, sales come and go and you otherwise need to get information up often and quickly.
Content management lets you update your site without any lag time between when you’ve decided to change something and when your developer can schedule the change. It will give you an efficiency you could never achieve with outsourced maintenance. And even though it will require some up-front investment, it will save you money in the long run since you won’t be paying anyone else to make those changes.
You Need An Expert In Your Business To Make Modifications That A Developer Wouldn’t Understand
In a specialized industry, it may be hard to communicate content updates that are extensive or require a specific layout, placement or formatting.
Maybe you’ve got price grids or tabular data, engineering diagrams or something that requires a trained eye to ensure that it’s accurate. If that’s the case, you probably want to get someone internal who knows your industry and who will be responsible for fact-checking and approving your content.
Even if a third-party could make the changes, you’d need to add a step in the process for quality control and that could cost time and efficiency. Better to keep the management in-house and ensure it’s done correctly, on time, the first time.
You’re Managing Internal Information
Sometimes you want to manage and distribute content internally. It might be documents, photography or other files that keep the gears of your business turning.
If you’ve got a repository of data that needs to be centralized so that multiple people on your staff can access it, a content management system is a great way to do it.
The other great thing about this type of system is that you can set multiple permission levels so that you can define which documents specific users have access to.
Don’t want Mary in Customer Service to see the special pricing you’re offering to your gold-level clients? Then restrict her access to pricing documents. The possibilities for categorization and distribution are limited only by your imagination.
You’re Neurotic
Ok, that wasn’t really fair to say, but the truth is that some people just like to control everything. They sleep better at night knowing that if they want to get up at 2AM and change that one word in that one paragraph they can do it. If this is you, then you’ll want a content management system so that when genius strikes at ungodly hours, you’re free to completely revise your company bio and have it published immediately.
If you’re a tinkerer, a two-a.m.-thinker or simply like to know that you can do whatever you want, whenever you want to do it then content management will give you that peace of mind and let you do business the way you want to.
Content management can give you control over your web site, help you achieve greater efficiency and save you time and money on web site maintenance in the long run.
If you fit into one of the categories here, then call a developer right now and get to work. If not, or if you’re still not sure, tune in next time for some good reasons why content management is a bad idea.
Do you manage your own site content? What system do you use?
