Archive for March, 2010
March 25, 2010
One Onion, Remove the Drupal and add Some Django
Seth Gottlieb wrote a great post looking at The Onion moving from one open source CMS to another.
One driver is that The Onion has developers on staff, which strongly influenced the systems that were attractive to them above and beyond the content management features. Seth points out their prior platform encouraged not tinkering with code under the hood while the new one is very code-centric. They also have an insane amount of traffic, which created a unique situation as well.
Good reading if you are into content management.
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March 24, 2010
Run Your Own TV Ads via Google
This is a great video report from Slate about how you can run your own television ads via Google.
Note that the average cost of acquiring traffic was around $1 for their experiment (although it appears this did not include production costs). If the average value of each new visitor to your site is higher than that, you’re doing well. Hat tip to Matt Baehr for posting the link this week.
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March 22, 2010
Announcing a new blog from David Gammel: Orgpreneur.com
I am very pleased to announce a new blog I am writing for those who embrace entrepreneurship in the pursuit of goals that matter: Orgpreneur.
The first few posts include:
Why You Must Make a Buck to Make a Difference
Why Entrepreneurship Matters to NPOs
Why You Must Put the Hairy Baby on the Table (one of my favorite stories from early in my career)
I hope you’ll check it out and subscribe!
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March 5, 2010
Why You Need a Content Management System
I was asked this question recently and thought I would post an answer here. I’d like to share some core reasons for having a content management system (CMS) as well as one new one that should seal the deal if nothing else will.
Core Reasons
- Separation of presentation and content. Design can be changed without touching the content. Content can be added or changed without touching the design. This enables specialists to focus on what they do best rather than having to be a Web generalist to modify the site.
- Content management. The eponymous value! Since content is stored as data, the system can provide tools for reporting and analyzing your content across the site which is immensely helpful in keeping content up-to-date as well as simply knowing what you have in place. The more content you have, the more valuable this becomes.
- User management. In most systems you can create separate logins for each person who needs to work on the site and limit what they can do based on specific roles or rules. This allows you to move to a model of distributed publishing, where content experts work on their content and web experts work on the overall site.
- Dynamic content presentation. While implied by the separation of presentation and content above, I wanted to highlight that this arrangement opens up new ways of driving traffic to content. It allows you to have the site display content based on content data or user data. Think of how Amazon.com shows products related to the one you are viewing on their site as well as suggesting products based on your purchase history with them. This is dynamic presentation.
There is more to it than that (such as web-based systems allowing you to update the site from anywhere) but most features are some mix of the above. Running a site without a CMS today is like writing a book on an old Selectric typewriter. You could do it but why in the world would you want to?
New Reason
Two words: social media.
If you wish to have a site that encourages collaboration, sharing and participation, the main elements of social media, then you will need to have a CMS in place that can sustain those types of activities. In fact, many of the open source CMSs on the market have strong roots in the social media world.
Implementing social media features on a site not built with a CMS of some fashion would be near impossible.
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March 1, 2010
2010 Snowpocalypse Operations Survey Results
Wes Trochlil and I have posted the initial summary of results from the 2010 Snowpocalypse Operations Survey. You can follow the prior link to the document on Slideshare or view it below.
Some of the most interesting things I noted were:
- Organizations with extensive staff telecommuting in place prior to the storms did the best at maintaining operations even if the physical offices were closed;
- The above didn’t help much if electricity were out at staff homes or they had children or other obligations to take care of due to mass closures;
- Respondent organizations did very well overall despite some of the most challenging weather conditions in decades.
We will release more detailed analysis in the next few weeks.
We encourage you to share these results with your colleagues and peers. Use this data to start a conversation about how your organization did and where you can make changes to better prepare for the next emergency.
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