I recently heard tell of the following activity, parading as content migration to an enterprise level content management system. I am not making this up:
When I heard this, something inside me snapped.
Aside from the stunning inefficiency inherent in creating all these disparate Dreamweaver files, this activity points to a fundamental lack of understanding of what exactly a content managment system is.
In the interest of quelling this misunderstanding in others, here follows a list of what not to do with a CMS:
- Copy large volumes of Web-content-to-be, page by page, into separate Dreamweaver files containing the design (created and sliced up in FireWorks)
- Copy/paste said Dreamweaver files into content wells of the content management system
- Repeat this activity ad infinitum until an entire Web presence is constructed in this fashion
always crashing in the same car: recurring mistakes and misuses of the web
Aside from the stunning inefficiency inherent in creating all these disparate Dreamweaver files, this activity points to a fundamental lack of understanding of what exactly a content managment system is.
In the interest of quelling this misunderstanding in others, here follows a list of what not to do with a CMS:
- Dump a bad Web site into a good CMS. If your organization's Web presence is a navigational Mirkwood; if it is a hodgepodge of disparate designs that appear to have little or nothing to do with one another; if the architecture resembles a map of Paris; if it is riddled with stale content and verbiage such as "New for 2001!"; if the number of pages has become so golgothian that 60 percent aren't even viewed by anyone; if the content is thoroughly embedded with HTML tags; DO NOT put this site into a CMS until you fix the thing.
- Override the content management system's navigational functionalities by hard-coding your own navigation into content wells. One of the most distinct advantages of a CMS is that navigation is generated dynamically and thus is tied directly to a raft of other functionalities - page context, embargo and fade dates, RSS, metadata, news and calendar items, features such as smart folders, and so on, and so on. Override this with hard-coded navigation, and all this is shot to hell. What you have is not quite as bad as a completely static site, but it's close.
- Embed your own code into content wells. If you are embedding styles, formatting, and navigational schemes into the content wells in your CMS, stop. Because something is wrong. Either the CMS is not meeting your site's requirements, or you do not understand how to use a CMS, or you just don't care. Embedding this code is not only sloppy, it is short-circuiting the functionalities of the CMS. It is also violating the premise upon which current Web technologies and best practices are based: separation of content from presentation. If you are doing this and overriding the software's navigational functionalities, then you might as well have stayed with a static site. What are your content providers going to do with all that embedded code, anyway?
- Shoehorn poorly built designs into the framework. This means amateurish designs, as well as those built in design tools and that are then "sliced" and rolled out to the public - so that the final product includes a myriad of tags, nested tables, images where words should be, and yards of embedded JavaScript. These are the Web pages that mostly disappear when you turn off the images in your browser.
- Don't train your people. Every CMS has a learning curve. This affects all members of the team - server managers, programmers, Web administrators, designers, editors, content providers. Your CMS and the Web presence within will be only as efficient as the people maintaining it.
- Don't clean up your content. Garbage in, garbage out. Enough said.
- Avoid important upgrades. For example: Builders of content management systems that have been around for a few years have had to reckon with their systems generating noncompliant code. The responsible ones have upgraded to meet current Web Standards. However, none of this matters if the customers do not implement these upgrades.
- Fail to set up 301 redirects. This is such a simple step, but it astounds me how few organizations do this. Entire sites get migrated, and the old URLs are taken out and shot. Meanwhile, search engines and users everywhere are treated to an abundance of 404 errors.