Now there's a title I'm sure many developers who have worked with content management systems have encountered.
Content management I have found is always seen by companies as a silver bullet to easily updating content on their website without the need for Garry from IT to make the change for them and enabling Marry from marketing to update the content herself after it has been approved by Bob the heading of marketing and checked by Scott in compliance.
What's usually involved to get to this stage is probably a vendor selection process to pick the best content management package for the company's needs or one that is inline with the company's technology roadmap. Some analysis is done and a general conclusion is that while we are going to content manage our website we may as well go for a completely new and WOW site redesign to upgrade our site that was originally designed back in 1999 to be more in step with how the web works now and we really need it to be accessible.
Now this is where the fun starts your designer puts him or herself on a mission to design the best site bestwidgets.com has ever seen it will be the best widget site the world has ever seen and he or she will be recognised in webdesign as one of the best web designers on the planet they'll get book deals and people will refer to their design as a water mark of excellence when doing designs themselves. His design will encompass the companies brand values and will appear to everyone who wants to look for a widget, never knew they may want a widget or were thinking they needed a new widget. The designer will be constrained by the usability expert who will interview and watch people/existing customers using wirfeframes of proposed solution and the old site. They will find out exactly what makes the user tick what they are looking for and how to get it to them, what makes too much noise on the site, how things should be worded and how the navigation should work etc.
The technical team will probably try to use the latest technology with xyz content management package. They will want to use the latest fangled technology concept "Super Power Constructs", the site will be the easiest to content manage but it will also use the cleverest coding techniques the world will never see, because its all under the covers. The code will be reusable and something that would take a day to code will be created from the content management system in a matter of seconds.
As you can probably imagine by now everyone has their own ideas and ways that they would do the site right down to the PM who will probably want to use the latest methodology his become a practitioner in to get the solution delivered (with the clients backing of course).
What might go wrong?
The designer after conferring with the Usability Expert and with the client comes out with a design in Photoshop that literally wipes the client off their feet. They have never seen such a great design before its going to put them far ahead of their competitors website AZAnotherWidgets.com clients will love it because usability has made sure it works with them because when it was tested it only took them 2 seconds to find what they were looking for instead of 2 minutes. The designer is happy and he has his design signed off and it finally gets given to the technical team who have just got them selves all setup and ready to apply the design to their content managed templates and master pages but have never seen the design except probably at a glance. Soon the technical team realise the design is near impossible to content manage when the designer comes to check on how it looks in HTML, for one reason the text is 2 pixels too close to the margin the font is not rounded enough
"What do you mean you can't sharpen the text?" asks the designer.
"People won't have that font on their machine so we have to use Tahoma," said the developer
"Well that's not good enough we will just have to use images for the title," says the designer.
The developer cringes this is going to affect his nicely contsructed code "But how do we content manage those?"
"Its okay they can make a new graphic for new headings on the site," says the designer.
"Okay I suppose I can store a path to the image title in the content management system," says the developer not at all happy about it but the clients already got their heart set on the design.
Content soon gets put into the pages and the developers start noticing that the design is not flexible enough for more than 10 lines of content in those cool box's of content on the home page. The designer's solution is
a) They will need to re-write the content
b) You will need to trim it automatically and replace it with dots if they write too much.
The developer murmurs something under his breath and gets it done.
The client gets the site and starts to use it and realises that the design they liked so much can't fit in the content they wanted and they now need to start re-writing it to fit. Marry from marketing wants to add a new section about PowerWidgets but Frank who does new titles as photoshop images is off sick today so she will have to wait. Eventually Frank gets around to doing Marry's PowerWidget title when he is back in the office and Marry submits her page into workflow for approval. But Bob the head of marketing is in China looking at a new factory and cant get access to the corporate network to approve the changes so gives Marry his username and password over the phone and tells her to approve it for him. Scott in compliance is on holiday and Lucy who is covering for him hasn't been trained on the system yet so they ask Garry from IT to override the account and make the change live. The business starts to realise that while the images make the site looks smashing its prohibiting them from making getting new articles live so they get Garry from IT to hack the system to remove the images and replace it with that Tahoma font. They also soon start to realise that Bob the head of marketing is almost never in the office and end up disabling workflow all together. In future Mary will email or fax her changes to Bob who can look at it on his PDA she will then email them to Scott in compliance for any changes that need to be made.
Now I've just gone and illustrated a disastrous fictitious situtation above some of the elements of which I have seen happen before. And before anyone points it out yes there are ways to automatically generate amazing titles using sFIR (still a few issues) and Image generation software.
What should have happened?
The technical team should have been involved from the start they would have been able to point out things straight away. They should also have been given the oportunity to test if the design was actually going to work if they were unsure. While photoshop does an amazing job it will never fully look like the photoshop design on the web. The client should have been made aware that design A may have implications on content management which was their primary goal. The business should also have been made aware by the BA that the workflow provided by the content managementn system was not a solution to sorting out the working processes in the business. The business needed to come up with this process internally themselves on how they would realistly work regardless of workflow they should also have thought of what would happen if the people who approve content for the website were not around who else could do it?
Another thing to bare in mind is not every design is content manageable, if the business must have a state of the art design that is not content manageable and nothing else will do then they may need to ask themselves are we prepared to support this site going forward? How long will it take us to do updates to the site and who will need to do them. In some cases I have come into organisations where content management applications have been put in places for a really amazing looking websites but its the type of design where Garry from IT has to use the the edit HTML source option on the content management application and write code to put javascipt buttons etc on the page. Soon its just IT changing the website again because Marry in marketing can't seem to figure out how to make Javascript buttons in HTML code for the links and all the content management application becomes is another version control system for IT to manage the website who are sent changes by email or printed off pages that have the changes circled for them. Sound familiar?