Bucknell Web Development

Any of you out there searching for a CMS for your college or university? Get ready for a major project. From evaluating, to demonstrations, to training, to migrating your site, there are many steps to this process.

We're going through our second CMS search/purchase, as the first one we bought turned out to be a product that the company stopped developing. So we've been basically riding a dead horse for about three years now, whipping it now and then and applying band aids.

Because this is our second search, we've learned a few things that might be helpful to those of you going through this for your first (or second) time.

1. Nothing's Perfect: There is no perfect CMS system out there, even if you have the people-power to write your own. Repeat after me: There is no perfect CMS.
2. The Biggest Hurdle: If this is your first CMS, the biggest hurdle has nothing to do with the particular system you select, and everything to do with the fundamental shift from an unmanaged to a managed site. Getting your campus community to think about the content and not the overall design is a huge change, and if you are going to harness the power of CMS workflows, expect some confusion and/or resistance.
3. Priorities: Take some time to identify your institution's top priorities for a CMS. Is it ease of use for the content contributors? Is it MAC compatibility? Is it flexibility? Coming up with your priorities will help you to sort through the CMS features.
4. Communication is Key: Communicate with your campus throughout the process. Hold open forums to explain why you are moving into a CMS. Invite stakeholders to demonstrations. Get feedback from future content contributors. Notify the campus of your plan for migrating to the CMS.
5. Training: Anticipate that there will be a significant time investment in end user training. Even with the more intuitive systems out there, expect that it will take about 45 minutes to train a non-technically inclined content contributor, longer if you are training in groups. And your content contributors keeps changing every semester.
6. Be Patient: Don't expect to be able to leverage all of the power of your new CMS right away. These are big powerful beasts that take some time to tame. Regardless of how much training you get from the company, it's one of those things that you really grow to understand by using it.

We're at the tail end of the purchase phase. Stayed tuned for our announcement about which product we selected what it's like to really use it. Next segment: Beyond the Demo.