You may already have a website, are about to redesign whatever you have or you want to create a new website. Whatever your situation, if you implement one basic strategy your chances of success increases many fold.

Solutions to complex problems are simple in most cases. But in the world of consulting simple solutions are often branded complex. You guessed the reason; people pay more, when it sounds complex! Content Management Systems suffered from complexity branding along with a big price tag for a long time. Using a Content Management System (CMS) to re-deploy your existing website or deploying your new website can increase your chances of success. Also the good news is that deploying a CMS is neither complex nor expensive compared to the business value it delivers.

Why do you need a website? What are the challenges for its success?

Businesses may have a big list of reasons for having a website. But if we state it simply, companies need a website as a tool to communicate to their prospects and customers.

As we all agree, communication is not a static activity, it is interactive and dynamic. Success of a website, purely depends on its effectiveness to reach out and communicate to its target audience.

Following are some common questions I have heard from Business Owners in relation to their website’s success.

· We have a website, but it has become old and not up-to-date
· Nobody is getting the time to update the website with the latest developments in the company
· How can we motivate our employees to write content for the website? Is there a way to get our partners and customers to write for our website?
· How to get more of the target users to come to our website?
· What about Search Engine Optimisation? Shall we stick with pay per click or both?
· We need to implement newsletters to reach out to customers
· Too many new technologies to market our web presence like RSS, Blogs, Forums, Podcasts etc. How to use all these with our existing website?
· How to manage and measure the success of the website and related marketing activities? How to measure Return on Investment?

The list is endless; I am not trying to write all of them here. But all of the problems connected with the success of a business website can be solved by having a “free flow of information from business to its end users”.

Free flow of information – Success factor for your website – Role of CMS

Creation, management and dissemination of information should be simple and efficient for “free flow of information from business to its end users”.

Creation of Content

The content creators of a company’s website should ideally include the Managing Director, Marketing Director, other key staff, partners and even customers. However in the real world many of these key influencers do not participate because the process is perceived to be both time-consuming and painful!

What is normally stopping them to become actively involved in content creation and what is stopping you involving them? They seem to be happy to write emails and other letters, so they have no writer’s block! Currently, they need to create content and then send it to a technical person (who is expensive and is a bottleneck) to publish it and then follow cycles of revisions and approvals. It’s only human to avoid hard work.

Content Management Systems make it easy for content creators to upload data; keeping the site up-to-date and saving money by avoiding the need of a technical person to constantly maintain the site.

Management of Content

Content Management Systems provide a way to have an approval process before any content goes to the live website. So different content authors can log in to the live website and edit the content without really affecting the website as their content becomes visible only when somebody approves it following reviewing. It makes it easy to provide secure access to your employees, partners or even customers (who are willing to write a review of your service to them). 

Content Dissemination

In short, this means electronic marketing. Put in the simplest terms, marketing is communicating to the right audience, in the right manner, at the right time, giving the right impression.

Search Engine Optimisation, newsletters, RSS, and many other high tech tools are all designed to achieve the same goal – that of communicating with the end user. Some content management systems are able to assist with this by incorporating built-in solutions.

There are many electronic marketing tools available that help in information dissemination. You can download an e-book that covers a variety of techniques relating to electronic marketing. http://www.customerhouse.com/hostedmarketing

Which content management system to use?

Now we all agree that, having a Content Management System is an essential factor in the success of your business website, but which one to choose? You may be surprised to see the number of products out there to select from, ranging from free to extortionate! Visit the site http://www.cmsmatrix.org/matrix for a comparison of all the major products available. One very powerful but free CMS is available from http://www.dotnetnuke.com that is favoured by the author.