Is Your Visitor Experience Stuck in the CMS with You?

We talk with our clients about content management systems (CMS) during discovery for projects. A lot. It’s an important piece of the puzzle, and a topic virtually anyone involved with the web at a college or university has an opinion about.

Does any of this sound familiar to you?

• There are religious wars among IT folks about PHP vs. .NET and open source vs. commercial.
• Often designers aren’t sure whether their problem is the CMS itself or how it was implemented.
• Leadership might not understand why they can’t have a site similar to a peer institution that’s using a different CMS (and has three times the staff!).
• Weary content editors, who usually have full-time jobs doing other work in admissions, student affairs, or development, just want to publish something on the web with any system that works.
• Marketing and communications staff are charged with feeding the content beast and figuring out how to spin up new features and keep the system running, all while fending off the hordes of campus folks who needed something on the web, like, yesterday.

To be sure, sometimes the CMS is the punching bag for everything else wrong with the process of maintaining a top-notch website. But sometimes a web team is just stuck in their CMS and when this happens, the visitor experience is usually stuck right there with them. 

[Tweet “Are you feeling stuck in your CMS? #mStoner shares four symptoms you can use to diagnose the issue.”]

Here are four symptoms you can use to diagnose whether you’re stuck in your CMS:

Symptom: We’re two versions behind the current version of our CMS software. 

Prognosis: The product is difficult to upgrade, so you’re stuck in an old version of the system until the appetite for a big project to upgrade the software develops in IT. Visitors think your site works OK, but the navigation looks like an org. chart. You’re stuck in the CMS.

Symptom: We have a great system customized for us by one of our developers, but she left two years ago.

Prognosis: Having great staff can lead to great things, until they leave, and no one knows how to maintain or change what they created in the CMS. Your visitors noticed that the pages look the same visit after visit, and the only social media you embed is Google+. You’re stuck in the CMS, hoping if nothing changes, everything will keep working at least for the next few years.

Symptom: The system works for basic edits but the templates are restrictive, and the design is not responsive to work on all devices.

Prognosis: It could be the CMS, or it could be the implementation, but either way some kind of reimplementation is required to modernize the website for the responsive web. Your visitors don’t understand why the site doesn’t work on their mobile devices. Whether it’s the CMS or the implementation, you’re stuck in the CMS the way it is.

Symptom: Things are broken in the system or never really worked right.

Prognosis: Your vendor changed focus, was purchased by another company (or purchased someone else’s technology), or just lost its way from a customer support standpoint. Visitors find broken links on 10 percent of their clicks, but they’ve stopped reporting them and just use Google to search for information on your site. You’re not getting the support you need to make things better, and you’re stuck in the CMS until you do.

What do you do? It may be time to evaluate your CMS.

We all try to make technology decisions that are sustainable and last. But Internet time is even faster than regular time. The iPhone is eight years old; the Android OS is seven years old; and the iPad turns six in April. Microsoft stopped supporting Internet Explorer 8, 9, and 10 this year. Sometimes even good choices outlive their utility after four, six, or eight years, as the technology environment and your institution change.

A CMS selection doesn’t always mean selecting all new technology.

Plenty of institutions reconsider the CMS they’re using as part of the process and sometimes determine that reimplementation (and redesign) in the existing CMS is the way to go. It’s an opportunity to take a step back, take stock of the situation, and shine a light on the problems … plus it allows you to let your campus stakeholders know they are heard.

The worst part? When institutions are stuck in their CMS, their visitors invariably are right there with them. Pinching and zooming desktop-sized pages on their phones, interpreting navigation structures that are more like a building directory than a list of information they’re looking for, and finding pages of 10-year-old PDF files in search results instead of what they’re looking for. So if you find yourself stuck, you owe it to yourself — and your visitors — to find a way out.

Need help? mStoner is happy to lend a hand.