Mulling the CMS Myth

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Thanks to either someone on my Twitter feed or on my Google Reader I discovered a new blog this week that really chimes with alot of my thinking recently. Called the CMS Myth it is a blog that really seeks to make a single point;

When it comes to web content management success, it’s not just about the technology.

I know I am particularly guilty at times of getting blinded by the search for the ‘right’ technology – and then inevitably feeling let down by it soon after implementation. This is despite the fact I know full well that the CMS itself is just one piece of the wider puzzle. The term ‘content strategy’ is bandied about alot these days and I tend to be a bit dismissive sometimes as I worry the hype is outweighing the usefulness but, and it is big William Perry sized but, the reality is that it is often the kinds of things covered in these strategies (people, processes, planning..) that make or break a CMS project.

The post that drew me to the blog is particularly pertinent to me at the moment; titled The CMS selection myth: Stop the insanity and focus on what really matters. It includes this nice term ‘CMS Readiness’ and an interesting checklist

  • Vision: Where does the organization want to be in 3-5 years and what’s the overall vision for how digital will drive the business forward?
  • Customers: How will your customer interact with you across their entire journey and what is the role of digital (web, mobile, e-mail, etc.) in enabling these experiences?
  • Content: How are you approaching the overall content strategy and how will it support the experiences you hope to deliver?
  • Team & Culture: How will you support the digital channel and CMS and do you have the proper roles and team members in place?
  • Measurement: How will success be defined and how can analytics and optimization be used to drive ongoing value?

Even for a non-commercial organisation like mine these are valid questions – and not ones to which I/we have all the answers so that is something to have a hard think about in the months to come. Anyway the blog seems to have a decent % of useful, practical posts so it has made its way unto my reading list going forward.

Talking #teacamp : social media guidelines

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Yesterday I finally managed to attend a #teacamp [original] in London – just weeks before the launch of the West Country version I thought was a good idea (in a moment of madness I fear).

As you can see from the pic below it was a pretty massive turnout and as such slightly different than I expected but Jane O’Loughlin did a great job of facilitating and managing the crowd and even without a mic and some rather funky background music it was easy enough for me to catch 95% of the discussion.

via @baskers

The topic of the day was social media guidelines though at times it drifted to wider implications of social media. To be honest I try to stay out of these discussions these days – not being a direct civil servant and being outside of London I don’t feel the scrutiny (or paranoia) that many people worry about and from a personal point of view I have clearly been pretty(!) open about my life on Twitter since day one and have never really felt a need to separate my personal and work personas (maybe because I don’t really have a separation point?).

I also have quite old fashioned (if anything to do with social media can be old!) ideas about where the strengths in social media lay and continue to find organisational/corporate attempts to interact on this level a bit jarring – though professionally I do continue to try myself as well.

Both Tim Lloyd and Steph Gray brought up the need for case studies and examples of best practice being what we need now more than anything and I wholeheartedly agree – the Digital Engagement Guide that Steph has launched is clearly a good step in the right direction for this but more is needed – particularly of engagement by and with [very] senior coleagues.

I have now written ‘social media guidelines’ for three different organisations in the last five years but I think the best quote of the day came from Nick Keane from the National Policing Improvement Agency (I paraphrase);

People who read social media guidelines don’t use social media, people who use social media don’t read the guidelines.

Never truer words spoken.

So a bit part of the point of yesterdays meetup was to help the Digital Engagement team at GDS with producing their social media guidance – which will almost certainly end up effecting all sorts of other departments and organisations all over the public sector.

For what it is worth I think the best thing GDS can do in this case is lead by example. A set of high level principles akin to their Design Principles wouldn’t go amiss and beyond that just keep doing what they are doing – especially getting seriously senior civil servants to take social media seriously (and I do think it is the civil servants who need convincing not the Ministers) – getting Sir Bob Kerslake to really use Twitter is the best ammunition for the use of social media I have had for years. For my corner of the world if Sir Adrian Smith suddenly was on board with social media then I’d be having *very* different conversations.

Multiple Mozilla Meetups :)

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Mozilla have always had a number of staff based in the UK but have just opened an official office in London for the first time near Covent Garden.

To celebrate this they have organised a little programme of fun events during May to ‘introduce’ themselves to the local developer & open web communities.

The events are all on the Mozilla London page on Lanyrd - I’ll be heading along to the ‘open day’ as I’ll be in London anyway and I’m hoping to get along to the bowling as well.

As I tend to tell anyone who will listen Mozilla is *much* more than Firefox (not that there is anything wrong with FF) and the Foundation has some amazing plans for a campaign around getting people to learn to be a ‘Webmaker’ this summer that I think will appeal to a lot of people I know.

Despite having to step away from my official ‘Mozilla Rep’ role due to time constraints and also having real doubts about the whole ‘Open Badges’ thing I still think Mozilla do amazing work and the tools people like Jess, Atul and Laura are working on to support the campaign really are amazing.

So if you are in or near London in May and fancy some geeky fun I really do recommend you try to pop along to at least one of these events.

Is ‘Agile’ important?

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I’ve linked to this on Twitter but I just wanted to comment on it here. Bob Marshall has written this brilliant post titled Agile Development Doesn’t Work and I think it is a must read for anyone in web development (especially on the management side).

It can be summed up with its introductory statement;

Q:
How to build great software?
A:
Build a great team, and have them build it for you.

It basically talks about the fact that getting talented, motivated people is the key to success and not the process you use. I remain a big fan of ‘agile’ development but increasingly worry that ‘Agile’ development has become a victim of trying to become mainstream. Look at the price of the courses, the reams of words written about it, the software springing up to support it and the ever growing lists of ‘rules’.

When it works well ‘agile’ is very powerful but I wonder if that is because on those occasions it attracted great teams who could have delivered amazing stuff no matter what the ‘management fad‘*?

GOVUK, to use my standard example, have recruited a small army of very talented, resourceful and dedicated people who would probably deliver brilliant work no matter what framework they were working within – though I do wonder if part of the reason (though maybe a small one) they signed up was the allure of working with agile so it becomes a bit of a chicken and egg kind of thing?

*Bobs phrase not mine :)

Considering the case against WYSIWYG

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Thanks to the power of Twitter I was recently pointed to this article by Rachel Andrew , who amongst other things is one of the founders of the lightweight CMS Perch, titled Your WYSIWYG Editor sucks. It riffs on a couple of topics that I have seen come up a few times recently and have had a few conversations about myself as I work out my thoughts for my next CMS project.

One of the topics is the idea of structuring content – basically creating web forms for defined content types that authors just fill in and the CMS can then cleanly markup and add relevant microformats/microdata/rdfa (or whatever else!).

The original presentation that brought me over to this way of thinking was the Anti-CMS  stuff Mike Nolan talked about and then more recently GDS talked a little about how they had built the INSIDE GOVERNMENT publishing tool and it sounded like a pretty similar idea of moving away from a generic, one size fits all editing interface to something more custom.

I have also been looking at a quite interesting start-up called Gather Content that has complimentary goals I think and maybe has the ability longer term to extend the capabilities of some CMSs in this direction without custom development.

Going down this route does remove some of the flexibility from your web publishing I think but in my experience this isn’t always a bad thing and when it is you can usually find a way around it. The challenge would be successfully defining the key content types. I can think of a dozen or so for the sites I am most familiar with and each of those ‘templates’ would have a dozen or so people who would think they know best :)

The second topic is one I am less sure about. The pretty universal hatred of rich text editors (RTEs) from developers/designers in this space has become a common theme and also the idea that it will all be OK as “we can just teach them Markdown” is something I have heard more than once.

While I can understand the frustrations designers in particular have with people using RTEs on sites where they painstakingly thought about every pixel the reality (in my little corner of the web world at least) is that content comes in from all corners of the organisation and is rarely ‘web first’ and outside of the digital team very few people have dedicated time associated with publishing to the web. Now clearly there is all sorts things wrong with this in this day and age but that is the reality I face.

I know alot of (public sector) organisations are looking are looking hard at ‘distributed publishing’ again as they seek admin savings and the idea that these myriad content providers are going to buy into learning something like Markdown or Textile in addition to the normal tools they use seems far-fetched and a situation where content is sent to a central team (or in reality these days a single person) to be marked up before publishing seems like a step back to the old ‘webmaster’ days with the real risk of a single point of failure.

I do like the look of something like MarkitUp that seems like some kind of middle ground and has a particularly nice preview feature but I still think the fact it is a code view would intimidate a large percentage of the people I’d need to ask to use it.

As usual I don’t have any real answer but I do have lots to think about anyway!

GOVUK Design Principles – first thoughts

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Bluetacked to the wall next to my desk at work is a print out of the Fifteen Principles the BBC used for their BBC2.0 project back in 2007. They have followed me from job to job (and job to job!) ever since Tom Loosemore spoke at a JISC conference that year and introduced me to them.

Now the latest project Tom is involved with has provided those principles with company (or perhaps a successor.) Yesterday the Government Digital Service released their ‘alpha’ Design Principles into the wild. To be honest it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. GDS have talked alot about a Global Experience Language in the same way as the BBC do  and although they (very) recently discussed moving away from using that term I guess I was expecting something much more…practical?

What we have instead are 10 high level, genuine principles that should underpin any and all GOVUK digital activity (with a few examples to back them up). While for GDS they are clearly operational principles I think for many of us around the edges they are more aspirational. They give us something to aim for and guide we can use to frame discussions with decision makers (who mainly see what we do as figures on a spreadsheet and have little feel for wider issues.)

I think they are great and suggest you head on over to the GDS site to read about them properly but here is the basic list;

1.  Start with needs
2.  Do less
3.  Design with data
4.  Do the hard work to make it simple
5.  Iterate. Then iterate again.
6.  Build for inclusion
7.  Understand context
8.  Build digital services, not websites
9.  Be consistent, not uniform
10. Make things open: it makes things better

The team also released a more editorially focused guide that got less attention but is actually really very interesting. The Content principles cover the tone of voice, style and decision making process about the type of content that GOVUK will cover.

The overview of the writing style alone is something that I’ll be pointing a few people at in the coming weeks and months.

  • serious but not pompous
  • in the vernacular ;-)
  • active and engaging
  • trustworthy and official
  • definitive and authoritative
  • incisive (but still human)
  • brief, succinct and to the point

Congrats again to the GDS team(s) involved in this work and thanks for continuing to openly share all this stuff as you go along. Impressed as I am with the stuff being built I think it is the way it is being done (and the kind of people involved in doing it – from the top down) that is really what is going to change things longer term.

My Internet (sorta like Bens)

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Ben Terrett, who amongst other things is Head of Design at the Government Digital Service, linked to a blogpost he wrote in 2008 recently titled ‘My Internet‘. It struck a bit of a chord with me – especially as so little has changed in those three years and how much I agree with. Numbers 1 – 13 below are Bens – the other seven are My Internet.

though I do think it is more My Web than My Internet :)

1. My Internet doesn’t use flash, evahhh. Unless it’s a video, and then only for video.

2. My Internet prefers html text wherever possible.

3. My Internet lets me use my email address or my usual username as a username. It doesn’t give me one or make me create a new one.

4. My Internet lets me use a password entirely of my own choosing. It doesn’t make me add numbers or Capitals wH3re I don’t want them.

5. My Internet values simplicity and clarity over almost everything else.

6. My Internet prefers tools that I’m familiar with like Flickr, YouTube, iTunes, Google etc. It doesn’t reinvent convention for the sake of it.

7. My Internet has a screen resolution of 1024×768. Today. As I write this. That will change sooner than you think.

8. My Internet has absolute urls for everything.

9. My Internet may not have exactly the same colours as My Printed Matter.

10. If My Internet was forced to choose between speed and visual lushness, speed would win easily.

11. My Internet has no back, forward or print buttons. That’s what My Browser is for.

12. My Internet has contact details clearly accessible right from the word go.

13. My Internet will not work for everyone, everywhere, always, at the same time, all the time. It will especially not work for CEO’s Aunties.

14. If My Internet was forced to choose between readability and visual lushness, readability would win easily.

15. My Internet has human readable URLs.

16. My Internet is mobile ready.

17. My Internet is user not organisation focused.

18. My Internet disavows the existence of IE6.

19. My Internet does not evahhh auto-start rich-media players.

20. My Internet is open.