Jonathan Dart, Director of Technology at Metric Marketing in Winnipeg, MB, shares his insights and tips regarding effective Content Management Systems to meet your digital marketing needs for your business. A Content Management System is a computer program that allows publishing, editing and modifying content as well as maintenance from a central interface. Such systems of content management provide procedures to manage workflow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual steps or an automated cascade.

2. The Wonderful World of
Content Management
Systems
with your host…
Jonathan Dart

3. About me…
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Web developer for 10 years
Involved in > 100 web projects
Follow me on twitter @jonathandart
Linked In

4. About
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CTO at Metric Marketing
Based out of Winnipeg
Full Service Marketing Agency
Roots in web technologies for marketing
All marketing revolves around measurement
Follow @MetricROI

5. Background
● Proper Geek

6. 90’s Jon

7. First exposure to CMS’s
2001

9. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W46dxG_R1U

10. Word Association
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Self management
Word processing
Publishing
More?

11. Audience
Experience

12. Who Interacts with a CMS?
● Developers

13. Who Interacts with a CMS?
● Developers
● Designers/Coders

14. Who Interacts with a CMS?
● Developers
● Designers/Coders
● Writers

15. Who Interacts with a CMS?
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Developers
Designers/Coders
Writers
Editors

16. Who Interacts with a CMS?
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Developers
Designers/Coders
Writers
Editors
Search Engine Optimization (SEOs)

17. Who Interacts with a CMS?
● QA

18. Who Interacts with a CMS?
● QA
● System administrator

19. Who Interacts with a CMS?
● QA
● System administrator
● Affiliates

20. Who Interacts with a CMS?
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QA
System administrator
Affiliates
Sales

21. Who Interacts with a CMS?
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QA
System administrator
Affiliates
Sales
End users

22. What is a CMS?
WikiPedia Says:
A Content Management System is a computer
program that allows publishing, editing and
modifying content as well as maintenance from
a central interface. Such systems of content
management provide procedures to manage
workflow in a collaborative environment. These
procedures can be manual steps or an
automated cascade.

23. What is
content?

27. Content is
Complicated

28. Most CMSs don’t align
with the way humans
think about content.

29. What is a CMS?
● Difficult question to answer

30. Prize Time!

31. The winner is...

34. How bizarre, How bizarre

35. How bizarre, How bizarre
● Huge Community
● Availability of addons and themes

36. “Yup, WordPress follows all bad practices of a
typical PHP project: mixed PHP and HTML all
over the place, lots of global functions instead
of classes and direct calls to the MySQL
functions instead of PDO so you can't use
another database like Postgres.” -- @huskyr

37. Real Reasons
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Written in widely available language
Cheap hosting
Permissive licensing
Free
Easy to install
Easy to use

39. Why?
Official Commercial Support
Free themes
Free plugins
Scalability

40. At a certain scale the amount
of customization a CMS
requires outweighs any of its
pros and cons.

41. Metric’s Original CMS
● Started as Ecommerce Platform
● After thought

42. The ocotodog

43. Don’t let your CMS be an
after thought.
Don’t assume creating a
CMS is easy.

44. Metric’s Next CMS
● Old one… DELETED!
● All new from scratch

45. Don’t make the same mistake
twice.

46. Metric’s Next CMS
● Built on a technically impressive framework

47. Being technically impressive isn’t everything.
Beware of over investing in the name of being
technically impressive - be practical. Don’t
assume building a CMS is easy -- even with a
solid foundation.

48. Words of wisdom
● Use something that already exists.
● Use the right tool for the job of today.

49. CMS Features
All parties need:
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Documentation
Community
Marketplace
Permanence
Flexible content structure

50. Audience
● Languages/Locales
● Targeted devices

51. Editors, Writers
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Well thought out user interface (UI)
What you see is what you get (WYSIWYG)
Asset management
Versioning (undo button)

52. Inline Editing
http://vimeo.com/7172499

53. Designers
● Simple templating

54. Developers
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Powerful deployment options
Implemented using known best practices
Interoperability
Caching
Security
Routing
Testing
Translations

55. System Administrators
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Can we host it?
Do we want to host it?
Maintenance
Scalability concerns
Security concerns

56. What CMS to
choose?

57. Small Business or Blogger with no
Budget
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Tumblr
Facebook
Google+
Wordpress.com

58. DIY Tinkerer with 30$/m
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LightCMS (Black box product)
Usual CMS stuff
Ecommerce
Nifty design tools

59. Small/Medium Size Business
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Original design or modify an existing theme
Some custom features
Find a freelancer with designs you like
Insist on a well known CMS, probably
Wordpress

60. Medium/Large Business
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Find a company with web experience
Original design
Custom features/development
Defer to tool of choice

61. Web Based Software Product
Owners
● Build on a framework

62. Questions?
Twitter
@jonathandart
LinkedIn