When you start getting serious about your website, you quickly begin to appreciate that the creation of your site was the easy part... but managing it is a complete nightmare.
It's Friday night, you're admiring your business website when you notice that you are incorrectly advertising a product at fraction of its real price and you can't correct it until your web designers open their doors on Monday morning...
Around the world, marketing and sales managers are realising that manual systems for managing their online content could leave them vulnerable. One online retailer recently received around 6,000 orders for the $544 monitor it was accidentally advertising at $164.
It's a sobering thought. Consider the following scenarios, all based on actual events:
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It takes a month to sign off your website's Terms & Conditions because every time one of your organisation's lawyers changes a full stop, all the other ones need to sign it off
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You realise that your website's visual design isn't working, but it will take a month (if you're lucky) to wrap a new design around the same words
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Your web design agency insists on all content being signed off two months before it goes live... then transcribes it incorrectly
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In a parting gesture, the web designer you fired replaced photos of board members with sheep
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You can't update one section of the site because another section has a major overhaul underway. You can either publish the entire site, with both complete and incomplete updates, or hold until both are completed
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You have to work through the night to publish the company's results at market opening time because you don't have a secure area to develop and schedule them in advance
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You send email promotions about upgrading to Windows 2000 to registered Mac users
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You're employing an army of skilled web designers just to update the system requirements of your software
So have no illusions - if you are running a substantive website without a CMS, you will hit a wall where your e-business is no longer sustainable because you can't update your website reliably, or quickly enough. At that point, you will need to tear down almost your entire web infrastructure and replace it with a Content Management System.
Last Modified: Tue 31-Dec-2002
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