Web Development 

Content Management

A content management system allows a person, or a group of people (usually company employees) to publish new content to their web sites without being concerned with the technical details.  That is, they don't need to be a web developer or necessarily know HTML to manage the creation, modification and removal of content from their website.  Although, at first glance, content publishing may seem easy, it is really much more complex than you think when you consider that content can come in many forms, while requiring publication in many different formats with varying levels of access authority and frequency. In order for non-developers to use the CMS, it therefore must be extremely easy to use, which requires a lot of internal, complex processes to handle all of some of the following:

• White papers
• Company News & Press Releases
• Images & pictures
• Product & Service Information
• FAQs
• Social Media, email archives & newsgroups
• Flash presentations and online demos
• Video & Audio

Of course, all of this content must be available to the appropriate content manager(s) with the proper level of authorization and the tools to manage the content quickly and easily.  Some companies have a single content manager; other companies have many.  A good content management system can be configured to match the needs of the business using it.  In other words, smaller companies should not be overwhelmed with unnecessary features and complexities.  Larger firms shouldn't either.  Some of the primary features of a good CMS include the following:

• Multiple people can collaborate and/or edit content simultaneously
• A workflow process can be setup to move content through the approval process from content creation to publication
• Security features are available to allow only authorized users to access the specific content they are responsible for  
• Versioning should be available to track of changes to the content and allow for previous content to be re-instated and to identify what was changed and by what user
• Content publishing should be controlled by a scheduling feature
• Multiple templates should be available (out of the box or custom-built) to effectively display the various types of content throughout your website.  This is critical in order to maintain a common look and feel across the entire website.
• Indexing, search and retrieval are also important features such that users can search for content using keywords
• The published web pages must be search engine friendly or have internal features to facilitate effective search engine optimization (SEO) tactics, primarily via meta tags

The web development staff at Beacon evaluated many different content management software systems a few years ago and selected Hannon Hill's Cascade Server CMS as its content management system of choice.  Our outstanding relationship with Hannon Hill allows us to provide Cascade Server CMS licenses individually to small companies and in bundles to larger companies that have multiple content managers.  This allows small businesses to take advantage of this industrial strength CMS at a fraction of the cost by using it in Beacon's shared environment.