Ensuring the Success of Your Website Initiative

According to Internet World Stats (www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm), there are over 1.7 billion internet users today. What are you doing to manage your web presence and reach your potential audience? A successful website initiative guarantees serious business benefits and substantial cost savings. These include increases in brand loyalty, customer support savings and better brand management. Content Management Systems help increase business agility and lower the TCO of your web presence. Why wait on implementing your CMS system? If you follow the advice below and build a solid business case, you will be successful.

The term "website" is overloaded. Today, web site development covers the gamut of everything from simple marketing sites to interactive online communities. According to Netcraft.com there are over 207 million active websites. This means there are a lot of companies building websites in one fashion or another. But it seems many of these companies are not always sharing what has worked and what didn't. So what did they do to make these projects successful and how we can learn from them? With over 4000 sites in 83 languages and over 1000 partners we decided to ask this simple question. Why do you think CMS projects fail? The main reasons we heard:

1. Web architecture projects are complex. Project requirements are often not well understood which leads to bad purchase decisions and architecture choices.
2. Inconsistent user experience resulting from poorly thought out content reuse and lack audience understanding.
3. Inconsistent site update experience for content managers, web designers and applications developers resulting in overly complex technology and process.

Given these challenges why would you implement a CMS system to manage your web presence? Here are our top five reasons:

1. Provide you customers a consistent and manageable web experience.
2. Drastically increase your customer retention rates.
3. Dramatically increase the productivity of your content managers, web designers and application developers.
4. Improve the security of your web site and protect your customer's personal information.
5. Improve business continuity and execution

While we can safely say there are many more reasons why you should implement a CMS. What are some of the pitfalls we have seen in the real world?

• Scope creep in project implementations. One more feature is only a little bit more work- right?
• People don't like to change the way they work. We are all comfortable with how we work - why change?
• Expecting the technology of a CMS solution to solve the entire problem. Managing content on a website is an editorial process - why not treat it that way?

As we stated above it's critical to get a solid handle on what your website is doing and how it works. We can't stress enough that you need to gather the right intelligence to get a true understanding and make the right decision. Very often companies don't think about putting their internal website participants into a simple list and outlining their current barriers and business needs. While it will give basic information, we recommend that you start by completing the chart below to get a basic understanding of your internal needs.

Before you start down the road of Proof of Concepts or a pilot you have to do investigation and build your business case. What are some of the questions you should ask your content managers  application developers, web designers and organizational leaders?

In completing these charts you have begun understanding the basic 'what', 'where' and 'how' of your internal process. Now begins the harder process of marketing the new solution. The concepts of 'pull' marketing offer some fantastic lessons to speed the acceptance of a CMS solution. This is a definite contrast to the traditional 'push' adoption by many IT departments. In taking the time to share with users the benefits of the new website in terms they value and understand (cost savings for the company, productivity, ease of use to name a few) it will make it a lot easier when the full rollout begins. The goal is to change it from 'your' initiative to 'our rollout'.

The biggest hurdle still remaining is completing the business case for CMS. The reasons we gave above are all fine to get you started, but what it really comes down to is the business case you build for this initiative.

In today's tough economic time, with IT budgets being cut, every CIO is having a tough time with continuous change. An even larger portion of your shrinking budget is going to maintenance and integration tasks with little left for innovation. Can you afford to diminish investments in your website? This strategy may buy some time for the short term but leaves little opportunity for growth. Don't you think it's time for that CMS implementation? With solid planning and understanding of the business and use cases you can ensure the success of your CMS initiative.

This article was first published in Business Management magazine: .