1. Aligning with Organizational Values & Goals

For first-timers, a common trap is thinking that any CMS that makes it easy to publish content to the web should be good enough. But your choice of tools, systems, and workflows will either empower or frustrate your team. To get buy-in from your team, you’ll want to look for a CMS that empowers them to collaborate efficiently and creatively.

To be effective in a modern team environment, your CMS should support:

• Configurable content creation workflows
• Easy asset management
• A wide variety of user roles
• Flexible page building for rapid content creation
• Collaborative content creation and management

Maintaining Flexibility

At the start of their journey, an organization may choose a well-known CMS to quickly build their online presence and start communicating with their customers. This can be a smart choice for the short term, but will have an impact on organizational flexibility further down the road.

As organizations grow, there’s often an unintended tradeoff with an off-the-shelf CMS. The CMS that enabled them to get online in the beginning is now not sophisticated or flexible enough to grow at the pace of the organization.

A CMS that is scalable and flexible should provide the following:

• A modern and consistent architecture for plugins and modules
• Custom content types that allow you to define how your content is entered and presented
• A query and list builder that lets you create and display lists of filtered and sorted content
• Composable content which enables you to build pages from snippets of existing content
• The ability to create content once and publish it to multiple channels
• Easy integration with other systems (more on this later)
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Minimizing Technical Debt

With content management systems, “more” is not always better. Design complexity within a CMS can contribute to a decrease in site performance and usability over time.

For example, your CMS may provide lots of plugins to enhance functionality, but as you add more plugins, your website can slow down and become unstable.

This idea is known as technical debt, and it’s a part of all software. Technical debt can’t be completely eliminated, but should be considered for organizations who want to get the most from their CMS in the long-term.

At Mellenger Interactive, we’re experts at engineering systems that are fast, stable and flexible. We take technical debt seriously so that you don’t need to stress over the future of your web site.

Here a some characteristics of a CMS that carries minimal technical debt:

• Built on a robust and modern framework that has industry support
• Provides a set of developer tools and software components that ensure consistency
• Adheres to web standards and best practices in web development
• Is modular and expandable using vetted and tested plugins
• Strong separation between business logic and content presentation

Preventing Integration Challenges

If you’re organization relies on critical software systems and programs that need to work together, finding a content management system that integrates with the larger environment can be challenging. Before you choose your CMS, it’s vital to understand the full picture of data inputs and outputs that you’ll need to integrate with.

Some examples of system integrations are:

• Email marketing and list builders
• Customer Resource Management systems
• Single sign on systems for organization user accounts
• Performance and security monitoring software
• Social media management software

Sometimes, an off-the-shelf plugin can provide all the integration you need. Most major CMSs have full-featured plugins for Mailchimp, Salesforce, and Google Analytics. If your business has more unique needs, you’ll want to ensure your CMS provides the developer tools and subsystems that make custom integration possible.

Our developers at Mellenger Interactive have created custom integrations for Salesforce, Hubspot, Marketo, Shopify, Woo Commerce, Stripe, Paypal and many other major third party systems. We’re able to help you choose a system that is best suited to your custom integration needs.

Stakeholder Buy-in

Your internal stakeholders will make or break your CMS choice, as they are the ones who use it every day. It’s worth thinking through their needs and considerations to ensure their buy-in on the chosen CMS.

Conclusion

An experienced web development team will be able to help you work through these five considerations so that the needs of your stakeholders are properly considered. The result is a CMS that empowers your creativity and remains flexible and highly performant for years to come.

At Mellenger Interactive, we love helping organizations work through these questions and finding the CMS that is right for them. Reach out here to connect with us and get a free consultation!