here it is

Jul. 23‘10

A 10-year-old e-learning company’s main priority was focusing on their core business, and as a result, they grew to be an industry leader with over 100M in annual earnings. The company’s website, however, wasn’t the focus of their attention. Several attempts were made through the years to redo both the site’s design and its content, but those projects were abandoned again and again as being too complex to be worth the effort it required. According to Google, the site had well over 7,000 pages in late 2009—all of which were created manually by teams of different employees and contractors from the past decade. The company possessed no inventory of these pages, the site had only ten menu items and the website itself was still optimized for screens and browsers from 2000. Yet, the website was being visited by hundreds of thousands of visitors each month, either looking for support or product information. Internal motivation started to wane, and this is where Mindspace entered the picture.

Our Interactive team was charged with the task of updating the existing website design and content, as well as making it dynamic enough to be easily maintained and changed. After an initial interview and a two month period of research and assessment, Mindspace proposed new graphic design and the creation of a custom CMS (Content Management System) which would allow for ALL content to be editable by the content owners and creators. An inventory of all pages was also delivered, along with a plan for cleaning and migration—a large portion of which would be automated. A five month timeline was proposed, along with a budget range and a video for the home page to present the company’s significant differentiators.

Despite significant unanticipated setbacks like the server being two months delayed, more than 100% turnover on the client site web team and a significantly increased scope, the website was complete ten days early and within the budget range originally projected. The client even asked to have the launch pushed back a week since they didn’t expect how speedy our delivery would be.

Today, the custom CMS allows for complete customization of the entire website. Old pages are being redirected to the new website, and SEO has been incorporated into all pages. Calls to Action are dynamically driven by the page content and there are well over a dozen modules that allow for different content types. Pages or entire sections can be turned on and off and moved or renamed—all while not breaking any existing links. A page inventory is readily available anytime. Multiple versions of content can exist simultaneously, and content owners each have a customized dashboard that they can use to communicate with each other about any content. Last but not least, the site’s content is almost entirely maintained by the company’s web team, which, thanks to Mindspace, is now comprised of one person.

Footnote: Within four months of the website going live, the company was acquired in a friendly acquisition aimed at growing the business.

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Mindspace has content marketing with Arkayne Socialize.

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Jul. 21‘10

How does a Fortune 200 company get to be that big? Often times, acquisitions are involved. And, as it pertains to our real life example, multiple locations, methods, vehicles and best practices are all thrown together in the process, too.

There was a sincere attempt at combining the best practices of the multiple teams, but a lot of time was typically spent routing, formatting and distributing content (rather than creating it). This is where  Mindspace stepped in to help. Our Interactive team was asked to assist one of the business units in creating simple to use, flexible and extensible communication tools that were to be used by the company’s MarCom team members for channel communication.

Our solution included several components. First, we started with the push vehicle—a website. The website met the company’s current branding standards, was built to be updatable any time and required minimal to no training to edit. The control of the content was given to the content owners, and different levels of access were created to accommodate a content owner hierarchy (some were allowed to post, others allowed to approve and others were able to create new sections or edit user access). The writers were also introduced to site visitors, which added a personal touch to the website’s communication style. Additionally, the company’s 10,000+ subscribers received a newsletter that had overlapping relevant content with the website.

Upon launch, a special outreach campaign was used with direct mail components and prizes to promote these new tools. Participation climbed continuously over the two years it was in operation, and the client confirmed that the new site was easier to use and less work to maintain than their previous disparate combination of solutions. The new website was also significantly more consistent with the company’s branding efforts.

In order to measure effectiveness, metrics were also built in that allowed each department to see how often their articles were read.

After two years, the Mindspace team was asked to take the tools to Phase II and extend it to four other business units within the same company. This has since been accomplished with a similar minimal learning curve and customer response. A few new features were added, like tracking per article, password protected documents, image inclusion, two-way automated Twitter feeds, “green” flagging, multi-national support and more.

Our solution, dubbed “Advantage,” is now being used by over 200 content editors across six business units. It continues to be a successful channel marketing tool that allows for a large disparate team to communicate in a concise, consistent manner. By putting the control in the hands of the content owners, not a web team, communication time was significantly reduced and the MarCom team was able to spend their time communicating their marketing efforts instead of managing logistics.

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May. 20‘10

I’ve spent a few bacon-laced breakfasts discussing the pros and cons of Content Management Systems (CMS) with my colleagues. Our table, surrounded by advocates of the devil, lob various justifications at each other in favor of one CMS or another. There’s no malice, only an attempt to arrive at the best solution for our latest web project. By the 7th refill of joe, we’re buzzing in agreement… just write the dang thing from scratch! It should be noted that the two greatest virtues a programmer can extol is hubris and laziness.

A client will often ask if we can use an existing CMS such as WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla to help speed up development and/or to trim development costs. After all, nobody wants to pay to re-invent the wheel, right? It’s a fair question, and one that warrants careful investigation. After all, the price tag of free often weighs heavily in the equation for prospective site owners, and if software exists that’s already 90% complete, why not start there? The short answer is a prime example of the 90/10 rule… The last 10% of the project takes 90% of the resources, and won’t get 100% of the way there..

There are some good arguments for using a canned CMS, such as: quick deployment, maturity of code, wide availability of expertise, and a broad spectrum of widgets to satisfy the post launch whims of the most eccentric site owner. At first glance, the CMS sounds too good to be true, especially after conversing with some young zealot who can promise a site up and running in less than an afternoon! So if boxed CMS’s are all that, why are there so many? As the cliché goes, if it’s too good to be true…

Following are a few items your CMS fan-boy probably overlooked:

  • Out-of-the-box CMS’s tend to look canned even though most packages can be skinned with pre-rolled design templates. Note that most of the heavily re-designed instances (say Drupal) has required a team of web developers doing surgery on the core organs of the software.
  • Content editing and formatting is restricted to the limitations of the CMS interface and HTML editor. Considering the greatest claim of the CMS is content editing without technical knowledge, this is invariably a drawback.
  • While it’s typically easy to upgrade the major CMS’s, any customizations may require a fork in code development which will render your installation void to further upgrades. So, even though it’s open source, don’t get too creative with the code.
  • Once you have established yourself with one web host that supports a particular CMS and version, it can become difficult to move your site to a new hosting environment.
  • It’s not enough to simply know the language behind the CMS, the developer needs to possess an in-depth understanding of the structure of the CMS itself, a learning curve that can be much steeper than merely learning the programming language.
  • With a large install base come many eyes. For both for good and bad, bugs are more readily discovered and potentially exploited when the software is ubiquitous.
  • Commonly, CMS owners find themselves compromising desired functionality for conformance to the available options of the software. Would you rather realize your vision or shoe-horn your dreams into a fixed space?
  • Considering SEO is a constantly moving target, it is nearly impossible for the shrink-wrapped CMS’s to keep up with the technology. Furthermore, expecting your CMS to be a magic pill for search engine rankings is simply not realistic.
  • Extensibility is a big sales point of CMS’s, but many site owners are blind-sided by the tall work orders submitted by consultants to perform seemingly menial tasks.
  • With many CMS’s to choose from, which one is right for you?

With all the negative vibes, you might be wondering if we ever think it makes sense to use Drupal or Joomla as the basis for a website. The answer is, “Of course!” – as thousands of satisfied web patrons have discovered. We just don’t think there is such a thing as a one-size-fits-all solution, and that the flexibility isn’t always as advertised. Moreover, most of our clients come to Mindspace for unique solutions that will make them stand out against the crowd. A cookie-cutter website is simply a no-go for the pro.

The Interactive team at Mindspace utilizes best practices from our collective years of web application development. At the beginning of a project, if we recommend a custom CMS, we typically have some explaining to do regarding the above. But usually well before the project is half over, the client realizes how, by re-using solid building blocks of time-tested code we are able to construct complete web solutions that not only delivers the vision rapidly, but also integrates current business culture and work flow.

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Mindspace has content marketing with Arkayne Socialize.

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