Discussion Group Page At IWMW 2005: North West Region
This is the Wikalong annotation page for the North West region discussion group
session at the IWMW 2005 workshop.
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BrianKelly, 29 Jun 2005. 16:15
Shortlist for the top three CMS challenges
Hi, this is Adrian from the University of Manchester. I was the reporter
for the North West region. Our group was quite big and we came up with quite a
few ideas, but we managed to wittle these down as best we could.
Our top three challenges were:
- Getting the right CMS for your users
- Getting a CMS that is flexible enough to meet the needs of the marketing people
and the varied needs of the users
- How to get people to actually use the CMS
Our solutions:
- Getting the right CMS for your users
- Make sure you get input from users
- Review and learn from past experience
- Face-to-face meetings with others who have experience of implementation
- Be clear about what you want the system to do - what works for others may not work for you
- Getting a CMS that is flexible enough to meet the needs of the marketing
people and the varied needs of the users
- CMS can make all the pages look the same
- Flexible design templates needed within style rule parameters
- Maybe some corporate style free areas
- Need to get users buy-in to the corporate identity
- How to get people to actually use the CMS
- Make an effort to sell the CMS to the users:
- Training, contact, support
- Allow time for acceptance
- Empowering non-skilled users / Don't de-skill experienced contributors
AdrianStevenson, 11 Jul 2005. 15:55
The notes for my slides expand on the bullet points above (hopefully!):
- Getting the right CMS system
- Involve users from the beginning - probably have some small scale systems
doing CMS'y things - make sure learn from what worked and what didn't
- Difficult to be honest in public/writing - Some senior managers read web-support?
- f2f very important - iwmw invaluable for this
- Don't go for the market leading product if it doesn't do what you want - what
works for one institution might not for another
- Need to know what you want the system to do
- Getting a flexible enough CMS
- More skinability needed - Customisability
- Don't want to restrict creativity /good ideas
- The needs of the art department - rich multimedia, are not the same as physics
- telescope viewer online. Complex to do within CMS
- How to get people to use the CMS
- Hold the users hand - re-assurance
- Keep in touch
- Need for balance - Dreamweaver users - allow for some handcoding - comes back
to the flexibility question
AdrianStevenson, 11 Jul 2005. 16:00
I'll try and write up the full notes and put them here soon. If anyone
else has some notes already written then please add them here
AdrianStevenson, 11 Jul 2005. 16:10
