Web and email content personalization is a fascinating topic, not just because most larger web operations need to achieve it, but also because so little knowledge about how to do it well is available. In the last five years, “personalization engines” have started to become standard equipment on the mid-market of CMS products Read More ›
I am surrounded by web apps during my workday. Many of my activities that used to be done using full-fledged desktop applications and file storage, like word processing, are now done up in the cloud using great tools like Google Docs. Read More ›
As the weather turns a bit more crisp and the days a bit shorter, we enter into a time of year where many of us find ourselves reflecting on all that we have in our lives to be truly thankful for. We pause and take notice of family, friends, and loved ones, perhaps new milestones in our lives from newborn babies to new jobs or new homes. (Well ok, maybe not in this market). Read More ›
In a previous blog post, I ruminated at length about the eerie nature of the software/information world, where human beings confidently stipulate all manner of distinctions (between for instance, files, databases, web apps, mobile data, virtual servers, etc.) that, though remarkably similar material under the hood, are considered to be “different sorts of things” because of their norms of use and the capabilities of the interfaces we have to use them. It’s all ultimately “the same stuff,” a semantic quicksand of zeros and ones and pointers among data with no absolute boundaries.
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Imagine this scenario: a large organization with a high-content website is contemplating a redesign, under what feels like very substantial time-to-market pressure. The newly hired director of marketing, perhaps a talented and charismatic person coming from a smaller organization, is rather horrified to discover the announced twelve-month roadmap to get to a new website: pick a strong CMS, architect the new user experience in the CMS, discuss governance and back-end concerns, implement, test, train and migrate tons of content.
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Decoupled CMS products (those that push website files out to a separate server, independent from the CMS itself) have many virtues, but they sometimes have the habit of creating extraneous files on a web server that don’t get perfectly cleaned up when they’re done being useful. Read More ›
Designing large web sites for the U.S. government is quite a different animal than the work we do for corporate or even non-profit clients. In general, a web redesign is a critical journey, requiring a very outward-focused orientation and a great deal of thought about how users will want to experience information. Read More ›
Many organizations have a news section on their website with content broken out into news posts, press releases, etc. as well as a multi-media section (with photo galleries, videos and other content). These areas were intended to keep visitors informed about the different things going on, but they may become liabilities, as organizations face the issue of trying to keep them current with new content. Read More ›
Anyone who has been involved in a large web site redesign probably shudders when they hear the word “content.” You’ve heard the expression “Content is King,” but that isn’t really how it went down last time. Content was more like the janitor, or perhaps an eccentric uncle you didn’t know very well. Read More ›
The following is largely a technical blog post, but may be of general interest to anyone who manages a large web site and wants to understand how metadata and automated related links work in an open source CMS. Read More ›
