Consider the many factors of a successful CMS migration, including:

Migration Steps: Vision, Plan, Pilot, Implement, and Maintain

Implementation Plan: Staffing, Detailed Content Migration Plan, Tracking Metrics, and Project Schedule

Style guides are a great way to ensure user experience consistency when developing an application and a way to communicate user experience standards across an organization. They can be application specific, platform specific, and may encompass enterprise-wide standards. A style guide can help make the development of user interfaces more efficient and help ensure good user interface design practices.

“Our department is different!” This is a common and legitimate response from groups used to managing their own websites. They argue that their needs are so specific there is little chance a common template can work.

The best-known is the ‘three clicks rule’, which says that all content should be no more than three clicks away from the homepage of the site.

This, however, is a myth.

Three clicks rule

The principles is that "users don’t like to click", and that their satisfaction with the site falls with each additional click.

This has developed into a rule that every page must be no more than three clicks away from the homepage. The big advantage of this rule is its simplicity: it’s easy to state and understand, and is therefore widely known throughout the industry.

It’s also perhaps the only rule that is familiar to management, outside of the intranet and design profession.

[CM Briefing 2009-21, read the full article]

Secondly, you need to make problems tangible, so they can be understood by executives who generally have little understanding of the web. Top management is often where the strategy has to be signed off, and if you are asking for more resources you will certainly need to show what difference you will create for the organisation. Often, web managers will focus too much on low level problems and technical details that are irrelevant to others.

I’ve been talking to numerous owners of corporate websites lately to try and understand where the “internet prescence” of large enterprises is heading in the future. In my view the future for the “corporate website” looks bleak. Online services in large organisations are gradually melding, with the intranet, extranet and internet growing closer in technology, content and resourcing; due to synergies and efficiencies achieved.

We’re certainly seeing a stagnation of many corporate sites, stuck in the world of dump-and-publish. That being said, the merger of intranets and websites seems a long way off. The challenge also remains for intranet teams to improve their current role and reputation, before taking on more challenges (such as the website).

It’s always interesting to peer into the crystal ball! I’m always for new and challenging perspectives, keep them coming…

While basic metadata is routinely captured by most publishing tools, including content management systems and portals, there is still widespread confusion about its uses and limits.

Common questions include:

• How important is metadata?
• What metadata should we be capturing?
• How is it created?
• Where and when is it used?
• Should we be implementing simple or complex metadata?

This article explores the fundamentals of metadata, as it relates to common intranet and website needs.

Standard metadata fields will be explored, and advice given on how to use metadata successfully, within typical organisational environments.

(October KM Column, read the full article)

You’ve spent months researching and redesigning your intranet or website. The wireframes and the sitemaps have done their job in communicating the benefits of the new design to the stakeholders and you’ve got good feedback from the users. The new templates are done up and the CMS is getting tuned. It’s time to think about those 2000 or so pages of content that need to go into the new website. Yes, this is the content migration phase that’s been getting a lot of attention lately.