Web CMS Buyer's Guide

The web content management market has come a long way since the days of static brochure ware websites that used basic html and a lot of pretty pictures. This first wave of CMS was heavily product focused with no thought to the engaging with the customer or prospect. It was a good first start, but it was only the beginning.

The second wave of web content management introduced the idea of web experience management and building dynamic websites. During this second wave, large complex web experience management platforms rose to the forefront providing a wide range of capabilities that tied the presentation layer to the backend CMS administration. While this approach worked for some, for many it became complex and difficult to manage. New publishing channels started to appear – like mobile and email – and it was increasingly difficult to support multiple publishing channels on a single platform.

We are now in the third wave of web content management and the website is one of many publishing channels the Web CMS supports. The third wave is about building smarter content that can adapt to different channels and audiences. It’s about new ways to deliver content without the overhead of a traditional Web CMS. Content is mobile first, intelligent and readily available for any website, campaign, app or device.

The CMS must become the platform for content creation, governance and orchestration, but not always the platform for presentation delivery. The key is to not get locked into a platform that can’t support current and future requirements.

A definition of Web CMS may be summarized as, “Software that allows nontechnical business users to manage content throughout its entire life cycle. This definition is about the only thing that many Web CMS solutions hold in common. As this Buyer’s Guide illustrates, there are a wide range of Web CMS solutions and use cases.

There is also a wide range of terms and acronyms used to describe a Web CMS – from customer experience management(CXM), to web experience management(WEM), to digital experience management (DX) and content management systems (CMS). This Buyer’s Guide uses the term Web CMS to encompass all of the solutions named above.

Organizational Buy-in

Critical to the success of any Web CMS their requirements known. In short, every level of the organization needs to buy into the critical nature of the business case for a Web CMS.

As an integral part of the business case, Web CMS buyers should strive to articulate as clearly as possible how the Web CMS will allow them to engage customers online. The bottom line always comes down to how relationships with customers can be improved. In the case of Web CMS, this is normally the online interaction. Improved branding, customer loyalty, content personalization, and multichannel management all contribute to a richer experience, and therefore to improved revenues – either directly or indirectly.

Usability

The importance of Web CMS usability cannot be overstated. With it, implementations have a chance of success. Without it, they do not. Employees who depend on a Web CMS to do their jobs simply will not put up with applications that impede their efficiency. If the Web CMS slows them down or impedes their progress, they will simply work around the system. This inevitably leads to implementation failure.

Customer Support

Excellent customer support is essential to the timely resolution of critical issues, which can dramatically impact company profitability. To take but one example, system downtime at the wrong time can dramatically compromise the web presence as a whole – think of the marketing campaign that can’t be viewed for the first several hours after a press release, for example.

If the Web CMS vendor does not offer 24/7 customer support, or if technical issues cannot be resolved quickly (within several hours), marketing, sales, and corporate communications overall can be The time-to-market, or speed of executing sales and marketing campaigns, is also critical to success. Gone are the days when one week was a satisfactory time-to-market for an online campaign. Now it’s more like 24 hours. For that to be a reality, the Web CMS must perform well in a number of categories, usability and web engagement foremost among them.

Vendor Roadmap

It’s important to understand the plans the vendor has for developing its Web CMS system. While most of your use cases should represent existing and near future requirements, some of them may be future based.

Vendor Stability

Finally, all of the considerations above become moot points if the Web CMS vendor you choose isn’t fundamentally stable. Buyers should ask themselves how vendor strategies and market presence will contribute to the vendor’s continued success in the market – or even existence – over the next few years.

However, it is important to note that traditionally the independent Web CMS vendors have been the most stable in the market, while larger portfolio software companies have waxed and waned on their support of Web CMS applications. A small company solely focused on Web CMS may have much more stability compared to a larger company that offers a Web CMS as a subset of a larger solution line.

An established roadmap can demonstrate future capabilities that align well with your future usecases.

To delve more deeply into use cases for Web CMS we will look at five of the most common use case scenarios: public websites, corporate intranets, extranets, community-based sites, and mobile sites.

Public Websites

Public websites commonly encompass:

Digital marketing (brand awareness and lead generation):

This feature of public websites is common to most companies offering online goods, services, and information. How does an airline get web visitors to purchase tickets from them versus a competitor? Web CMS’s will commonly have digital marketing and lead-generation tools built in that allow marketers to increase the speed of creating marketing campaigns, incorporating search engine optimization, lead-generation capabilities, analytics capabilities to monitor user activity and determine what visitors are interested in, and so on.

Product-based sites (e-commerce):

Critical to product-based sites is the ability to structure and categorize content so that inventory can be effectively merchandised and displayed in different sections of the website (for example, an air-conditioner sold in “Appliances” and “Heating and Cooling”), and across channels. Also important on this type of site is the ability to combine elements of product descriptions. Here, information such as product SKUs, bar codes, descriptions, user ratings, images, availability, pricing, manufacturer information, warranty information, related products, shipping information, availability in nearby stores, etc. become the critical functional building blocks. In addition, the ability to offer content that isn’t product specific but demonstrates an understanding of the user’s needs and challenges and the market is required (this is often referred to as “content and commerce”).

Member services-based sites:

This contains a fairly broad range of use cases, but generally requires users to log in for access to services based on tiered service level agreements. Members may have access to one part of the site but not others. Alternatively, they may be entitled to certain benefits based on their status level or tier level, and may not have access to certain information beyond that level. The key for this functional area of public websites is that services and access to content be based on users’ membership levels.

Federated websites:

Large organizations such as universities, government agencies, non-profits, and corporations often manage a significant number of loosely connected websites. These “federated” sites are most easily understood as multiple instances of the four use cases described above, with each department of the university or organization running one or more of the aforementioned scenarios.

Corporate intranets

Corporate Intranets are the next use case for Web CMS implementations. While not necessarily different from public-facing websites in terms of features or functions, intranets do tend to share a common set of unique features and functions, which include:

Human resources service portals:

The most common use case for the corporate intranet, the HR service portal disseminates any and all relevant corporate information to internal constituents. This information includes corporate policies, benefits, pay information, access to employee retirement accounts, stock options, payroll and tax information, medical benefits, etc.

Employee enablement tools:

Another typical use for the corporate intranet is the provision of employee enablement tools, as demonstrated by an intranet sub-site for the sales force that includes training materials, marketing collateral, price lists, competitive analysis, SLA directives, etc. Generally speaking, the goal of the corporate intranet is to expose all corporate information in order to enable employees and disseminate that information.

Extranets

Extranets are analogues to the corporate intranet that extend their functionality to partners and customers. In this scenario, people outside of the company have log-ins that gain them access to certain information within the content repository. Content access control is applied either at the repository or database level. Extranets also allow individuals outside the firewall to join internal workflows.

Taken together, public-facing sites, intranets, and extranets, are enabled by the core features of the web CMS. They are simply different permutations of the features exposed to different audiences.

Digital Experience Portals

Digital Experience Portals are an essential platform for building and supporting key audiences and communities. A portal is simply a secure website that delivers content, applications or online services, collaboration and engagement.

You use a digital experience portal for any use case that requires secure access to information, collaboration, or explicit personalization based on the user profile.

Common use cases are customer service portals, company extranets, partner or distributor portals, membership portals and communities, purchasing portals, student or academic portals, or employee portals.

Today’s portals differ from traditional portals because they connect key information and systems to provide content-driven experiences within the portal directly. They not only offer the ability to integrate information from other repositories and applications, but they include complete content management capabilities that support a wide variety of needs.

A Digital Experience Portal is not a point solution, and it’s more than a database of content. But it’s also not an out-of-the-box solution that you can quickly plug and play. The very nature of unifying multiple sources of content, integrating multiple applications, modeling unique business processes, and engaging users with your brand pretty much excludes “out of the box.”

Although each type of portal supports a unique purpose, most have a number of common features including dashboards and home pages, built-in content management, integration with backend systems such as CRM, ERP and Marketing Automation, document storage, collaboration, social and community features, analytics, mobile access, member management, SSO, Permissions and Access.

Mobile Websites

Mobile websites, including mobile and other devices, such as tablets and kiosks, are a distinct use case for many considering a Web CMS implementation. Mobile websites can support all of the use cases listed above, as well as native mobile applications. Generally, a mobile website will deliver a task-based user experience, support optimal layout on a wide range of devices, and feature multi-touch interactions for tapping and swiping elements of the websites. Mobile websites may also take advantage of device capabilities, such as local storage, cameras, GPS and other features.

There are two ways your CMS supports mobile websites: responsive design and adaptive

Responsive design is the most common approach to mobile web development and it’s rare that a Web CMS doesn’t support it. It refers to flexible web page layouts that automatically adapt to the size of the viewing device’s browser. Cascading style sheets (CSS) are the foundation for responsive design, empowering designers to manage the presentation layer independent of the content. Web developers can scale fonts, resize graphics, and even change layouts based on the size of the screen.

Adaptive design detects the device you are using and creates a unique visual experience for that device size. So instead of creating one design and rendering elements responsively based on CSS media queries, with adaptive you create a set of designs, each one supporting a different device, or set of devices.

Responsive design allows you to deliver one set of content with one design to a website whether it’s viewed on a desktop, tablet, or smartphone; as a result, it is the predominant approach to mobile-enabling your web experience. However, if your web experience supports a range of devices such as different sized smartphones and tablets, wearables, kiosks, game consoles and more, an adaptive design approach may be a better option.

While the features and capabilities vary widely between Web CMS platforms, there is a core set of feature-functionality that all prospective Web CMS buyers should include in their requirements. This section is not intended to be a complete list of Web CMS capabilities, but rather highlights many of the essential features of Web CMS applications, the absence of which would be a dealbreaker.

Content Authoring

Web CMS systems should provide a content authoring environment that is easy for everyone to use, technical and non-technical. The Web CMS should provide a WYSIWYG content editor, which is essentially a word processing-like application that runs inside a standard browser. The user interface of WYSIWYG editors is very similar to word processing applications in which users can select spacing, alignment, text attributes, hypertext links, colors, images, spell checking, etc. The Web CMS should also provide the ability to edit content incontext of the page preview as well as in a forms-based view that supports additional structure and metadata.

Browser-based Clients

Browser-based clients refer to an application running inside a browser, as opposed to an application that needs to be installed on the desktop. Using a Web CMS with support for browser-based clients is important in order to maximize the number of potential content contributors. Assuming that everyone has browser access, browser-based clients ensure that everyone can use the Web CMS.

Whether a client is browser-based or not, it is important to understand which web browsers the software can run in (Microsoft Internet Explorer, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, etc.) as well as the supported operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows or the current Apple OS.

Content Re-use

Content re-use is often considered the number one factor for return on investment of a Web CMS. Good Web CMS’s ensure that source content is available centrally, and when changes are made to the source, updates are disseminated to every instance where the source content is used. For example, if a company changes the location of its headquarters, updating the corporate address inside the Web CMS would ensure that every time the address is published on the website – or in printed materials, or anywhere else – the updated address is used.

Some Web CMS’s are based on XML, or similar technology, and are developed to meet a wide range of content re-use scenarios. This may include exports for elements such as titles, abstracts, and thumbnail images in order to create content indexes and navigations, the ability to support multi-channel content deployment to desktop web, mobile, print, and kiosk “channels,”, and the ability to re-use content across multiple websites.

Workflow

All Web CMS’s should provide for the assignment of content authoring by individual or role. That is, a supervisor may decide that Joe Smith should author an article, in which case a task is sent to Joe Smith’s email inbox. Alternatively, the same supervisor may decide that anyone with the title of marketing manager should author the article, in which case the workflow would send the assignment to anyone with the title marketing manager. Once the task is accepted and content is authored by the appropriate individual, the article is sent back to the supervisor for approval.

Workflows may include any number of approval stages and, once complete, content is published to the appropriate destination. Workflows may also include individuals outside of a company, such as business partners or content translators. Non-technical users should be able to set up workflows without the involvement of IT. This means that workflow tools should be visually-based and not require coding.

Versioning

As documents, web pages, and other files are updated over time, the Web CMS should maintain all previous versions, and allow for version restoration, or “rollback,” at any time. In addition to the simple maintenance of previous versions, the Web CMS should indicate who was responsible for every change. This ensures that previous versions are always available, and also allows for accountability. Many Web CMS solutions also provide red-lining or version comparison capabilities that highlight the changes to each version of the page.

Version history is critical in industries such as financial services, health care, and life sciences that have compliance and reporting requirements. These organizations generally need more sophisticated audit trail capabilities that show who made content changes and track which versions of the content have been published.

Taxonomy

A Web CMS should maintain a standardized taxonomy, which is essentially a lexicon that defines what terms mean and their degree of relevance to other terms. Taxonomies allow you to organize and deliver content by category and make it possible for users to search for specific content without knowing the exact term used by the content author. For example, if a user searches for “lawsuit” when the original author used “litigation,” the taxonomy would establish relevance between the two terms that would return content for “litigation” based on a search for “lawsuit.”

Taxonomies are especially helpful in conjunction with metadata and can be critical in managing customer experience through segmentation and targeting of key audiences, guided or faceted navigation, and better search experiences.

Digital Asset Management

The Web CMS should manage all types of digital content, including images, video, and documents. In many cases, digital assets are the main element of an experience as seen particularly with videos and infographics, along with social media content for sites like Instagram and Facebook.

DAM capabilities within a web content management platform are the best approach to ensure digital assets are an integral part of the digital experience. Assets can be mapped to the Web CMS taxonomy and the appropriate metadata applied. Having digital assets managed within the same WCM platform should help reduce the number of redundant or duplicate assets because a single asset is used across web, mobile, and social experiences.

A single platform to manage digital assets and text-based content improves marketing agility, especially within the web page (or mobile) creation process. Not all Web CMS manage digital assets directly within the CMS itself, but there are simple capabilities that all Web CMS should support including the ability to automatically resize images, or use an internal image editor. Another good feature is federated asset management where assets can be stored in different locations, but leveraged within the CMS.

Templates

Since pages within a website typically follow similar structures, Web CMS’s should provide the ability for users to create a new page based on an existing design. These designs are frequently called “templates” or “page types” and they should be readily accessible by non-technical content authors and editors. To learn more about templates, refer to the “Web CMS Template Approaches” section.

Some Web CMS provide built-in visual page builder capabilities which enable a nontechnical user to quickly create a page from existing templates, widgets or components.

Visual Page Builder

A Web CMS should provide built-in visual page builder capabilities which enable a non-technical user to quickly create a page from existing templates, widgets or components. A page builder supports quick modifications to existing templates, without the need to bring in web developers. The Page Builder should also be able to generate new templates and layouts from a blank canvas, and to generate a data model or “schema” for those templates based on the content and blocks or widgets that are applied.

When evaluating a Visual Page Builder make sure that is supports the latest mark-up standards for responsive design so your templates are optimized for mobile devices and tablets. The CMS should support multiple responsive frameworks, with the ability to easily update or customize the framework so you are not locked in to using legacy frameworks in the future.

Analytics

A Web CMS should provide a means of tracking how website users interact with content – how many times they’ve accessed a page, the clickstreams used to navigate content, the ads that were most effective, etc. Analytics modules are the means of doing this.

Web CMS software generally supports analytics one of two ways: a built-in analytics module or support for a third party analytics provider. While the integrated analytics of a built-in module is a nice feature, analytics is a software category of its own and has a much broader features set than can typically be supported by a Web CMS.

In our opinion, the better approach to supporting analytics is the provider model. With this approach, customers connect their existing analytics systems with Web CMS dashboards that provide context to the content. Providers for analytics may include Google Analytics (usually free to use), Webtrends, Omniture, and other systems.

Search

A Web CMS should provide search tools for the content repository. Search tools should offer options for content retrieval, relevance, and any number of other criteria appropriate for faceted search (“facets” referring to criteria such as file type, file size, color, date, region, price, brand, etc.). A Web CMS generally uses different solutions for an internal content or repository search and an external public web search, but this doesn’t have to be the case. A public web search is often served by a third-party search application, such as Apache Lucene, Microsoft Enterprise Search Server, others.

However, some Web CMS’s provide a built-in search application that supports both internal content management and external public website use. Tightly integrated search, or a native search-based architecture, means the search engine can quickly index all content in your CMS — structured and unstructured — thus improving the discoverability of relevant content in a single experience. It can also leverage CMSs built-in taxonomy and metadata functionality to further improve the quality of the search results.

Reporting

A Web CMS should provide reporting tools that make understanding content consumption quick and easy. These are typically dashboards that display content usage summaries.

Beyond a set of standard reports, such as audit trails, pages in workflow, etc., the Web CMS should provide the ability to create custom reports, such as where a digital asset is used within the website and in what context, or which components or widgets on a particular page are performing best. The ability to export a report as a Microsoft Excel or CSV file is also important.

Mobile Device Optimization

Mobile may be the most important feature or set of capabilities in evaluating a Web CMS today as it is outpacing desktop Internet growth by a wide margin. Since content will be delivered to a wide range of mobile devices, the Web CMSshould optimize content for delivery to those devices.

In order to do this, the Web CMS must be able to detect which device is making a request and deliver the right amount of content in the right screen format, checking for possible content incompatibilities, such as Adobe Flash content delivered to an iPad. Mobile may be the most important feature or set of capabilities in evaluating a Web CMS today as it is outpacing desktop Internet growth by a wide margin.

Since content will be delivered to a wide range of mobile devices, the Web CMS When planning for mobile it is also important to consider whether you need to develop a separate website or native app from your desktop website, or add another layer of presentation to your existing website to support mobile users. The decision often comes down to whether your website will support responsive or adaptive capabilities.

With responsive design, the web page is automatically resized based on the width of the browser used by a device. This minimizes the need for scrolling, panning or manually resizing the screen. Typically, you design web pages for the desktop and the responsive framework does the work of resizing and reframing the content for smaller form factors. Responsive is a popular approach, but doesn’t necessarily address all the different mobile use cases.

The second approach is design for mobile first (adaptive design). Mobile first means that you start your design thinking about the mobile user. You outline the content priorities, the core areas of the web page and how your visitors will engage with the web page using a mobile device. You can do this using responsive framework, but the best approach is to leverage your CMS’s device detection capabilities to intelligently deliver content based on the device. Another consideration is how the Web CMS can support multi-touch user interactions to enhance the customer experience on smartphones and tablets. Web CMS solutions with strong mobile capabilities support app-like mobile experiences and deliver touch-based interactions using HTML5 and frameworks such as jQuery mobile.

Applications

Since websites typically include a number of common elements such as calendars, newsletters, blogs, multimedia, user forums, etc. a Web CMS should provide each of these application types as a part of the basic product. Beyond the set of modules, Web CMS software should provide the ability to integrate content with external applications. There are two different aspects of application integration to consider. The first is the ability of the Web CMS to integrate with other business applications such as a CRM, marketing automation, ticketing support system and so on.

API-based Web services support, using SOAP or REST-based protocols, as well as connectors to external databases, are critical in integrating an organization’s line of business applications and legacy systems. Generally, a Web CMS’s ability to easily integrate with applications and data is referred to as the “extensibility” of the CMS platform. While extensibility is often one of the most difficult aspects of a Web CMS to evaluate, it is a critical consideration in gaining the business efficiencies and capabilities required in a website or project.

The second approach is the ability to manage content within the CMS for external applications and websites. This approach, known as Content-as-a-Service, or simply CaaS, is a strategy for delivering CMS managed content to Web applications and other channels. With CaaS you can manage and edit your content in a CMS and when the content is ready, it can be pushed as a resource file into an external application or the application can request content using an API-based web service. Not all Web CMS support content-as-a-service, so if this is a capability you require, investigate your CMS options.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO is a mix of various features in the Web CMS that support best practices to help elevate search engine rankings for websites. Support for SEO should include:

Search engine friendly URLs: Web addresses for each page that describe the topic of the page, show where the page is organized in the website and do not use any special characters such as question marks, to denote dynamic content.

SEO metadata: The Web CMS should make it easy to add descriptive metadata for titles and page descriptions. It should also provide the ability to auto-populate metadata by default. Additional “bot” instructions, such as “no index” and “no crawl,” should also be available.

XML site maps: Site maps are connected directly to leading search engines, such as Google and Microsoft Bing, and notify search engine crawlers of new or updated content and its priority in terms of indexing frequency.

Automatic redirecting and forwarding: When pages are renamed, moved or deleted, the Web CMS should automatically issue a permanent redirect so people using the old links can find the new content or be directed into other pages.

Canonical URLs: Every web page should only have one authoritative address. Canonical URLs redirects users from every variation of a web address to a single address. This may include adding (or removing) the www. before the domain and redirecting for various extensions (such as .htm, .aspx or .html).

Multilingual

The ability to publish web content in different languages and for different geographic regions is critical for many organizations. A Web CMS should streamline the multilingual publishing process, making it easy to define a locale – a combination of language and region, for example French (Canadian) – for different sets of content.

Typically, a Web CMS can support multilingual in two different ways: as a version of each page, or as a clone of each page. Versions make it easy to track each translation for a page; however, the source page and each translated version of that page are bound together, so it becomes difficult to organize a different set of navigations and site structure for each language version of the site.

In the cloning approach, content is branched from the source page, but also remains linked to that source page. The cloned page may be organized into a different site structure. When one version of a page is updated, the owners of each of the other clones are notified of the changes. We find that for most organizations cloning is a better approach, as companies often offer different products and services in different countries. The ability to support variation is essential.

A Web CMS should support translation, either side-by-side in the CMS, or through an external translation service bureau using an import/export system. Web CMS clients utilizing multilingual features need to support foreign character sets, such as double-byte characters and Unicode, as well as bidirectional (BIDI) text for Arabic and other languages. Lastly, it is often essential for Web CMS software to provide localized versions of the software so users in different countries can work in their own language.

Multisite Publishing

A Web CMS should provide the ability to manage and deliver content for multiple sites. Again, like SEO and multilingual, multisite publishing is not as much a feature as a collection of features in support of best practices.

Publishing targets provide the ability to choose which sets of content are deployed to which location and site, as well as determining the format the content is delivered in. For instance, a news story may be published to the public website using one look and feel and to the company intranet using another.

Similarly, a Web CMS should support managing content in different environments, such as test, staging and production. Content may be promoted between these environments to ensure that it is properly tested and approved before it goes live.

Finally, the CMS should offer a Content API your external applications can connect with to pull content from the CMS. This API is read-only so you can’t change content in the CMS, only access what is already approved for publishing.

For the purpose of explaining deployment options, let’s assume that the optimal set of content for a website exists within the content repository. There are a number of ways that content can be delivered.

Early vs Late Content Binding

The first consideration is that of binding. That is, when does the content on a web page actually bind with the page? When a web page always consists of the same content – such as a press release, for example – that page is said to be static. The content on the page never changes (unless updates are made to the content itself). When a website visitor views the web page, the press release will always be the same. In this case, the content has “bound” with the page at a very early stage (known as early binding).

In other instances, website content does not bind with the page until the website visitor requests the page. Suppose that a visitor clicks on current events. Within the repository are events that happened last year, this week, and events that will happen next month. Therefore, the current events page will have content that changes on a daily basis; in this case, the page and the content bind only when a user requests the page. This is called “late binding” content, and such pages are made possible by the dynamic capabilities of the Web CMS.

Instances where late binding capabilities are important include those where companies will want to offer content based on user preferences. Retail enterprises may want to present a particular color or size of clothing when a shopper clicks on the current specials section. This may be dependent on product availability, which the Web CMS may also need to check prior to delivering the content.

When considering the purchase of a Web CMS platform, buyers will want to understand in detail what the capabilities for the early and late binding of content and pages are. In most cases, there will need to be some ability to combine early and late binding content, such as a press release as part of a page that contains several other content objects. The collection of objects on this page would be late binding.

Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Another website deployment consideration is whether to use a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN provides mirroring and caching of web content across multiple servers placed in data centers worldwide. CDNs provide very fast content delivery and are ideal for delivering images as well as streaming media files. With a CDN, you can easily scale content delivery without adding additional hardware by utilizing native cloud services. Because content is redundant, a CDN helps ensure maximum uptime for websites.

The challenge of working with a CDN is that it is difficult to support dynamic content. Some CDNs support a short list of server technologies, but deploying dynamic or data-driven content on a CDN adds additional complexity and can be expensive. CDN deployment often requires using a static, decoupled deployment of HTML, or the “pull” approach, where the content is pulled in by the application pages from static content.

Today many organizations buying a new Web CMS are upgrading from a legacy system.

Organizations change CMS solutions for a wide range of reasons: the user experience may be too complex, the software may have been implemented incorrectly and requires additional investment, the old CMS may not offer the current features required to deliver a compelling web experience, the cost of upgrading to a new version warrants an evaluation of other solutions, or the system has become too expensive to support, to name only a few.

For buyers upgrading from legacy systems the outlook is good. Web CMS software has improved dramatically over the last few years, while costs have fallen. You can get more from your Web CMS investment than ever before.

While upgrading does not fundamentally change the process of buying a Web CMS, it does introduce additional criteria. Foremost is how the existing content and applications may be migrated into the new Web CMS. While many vendors provide migration or site import utilities, the fact is that migration always requires some investment and level of effort.

A content inventory is generally a best practice when migrating to a new Web CMS. In a content inventory the content owners define which pages need to be created, refreshed, maintained, or retired and prioritize those updates. Integration of existing and planned applications requires understanding the Web CMS technology platform, extensibility and deployment model.

Second-time Web CMS buyers are often guided by the pain of their existing system, rather than the opportunities of the new system. If the legacy Web CMS was slow to publish, or made it difficult to support multiple environments like staging and production servers, evaluators tend to focus on these issues above all other criteria. While we would not recommend purchasing a Web CMS that does not meet key requirements, it is also important not to miss the forest for the trees. The focus should be on the features and support that can help you execute your business strategy.

Lastly, every Web CMS is different. The savvy buyer knows it’s not what the CMS can do, but how the CMS supports each feature and use case. Even experienced Web CMS buyers can fall into “check- box” evaluations where the emphasis is on the breadth of features, rather than the overall value of the solution based on the quality and depth of the features, the usability, and key criteria such as performance and scalability.