High Context Consulting

Archive for the 'Articles' Category

July 10, 2004

I’m not dead yet!

Webmonkey: The Web Developer’s Resource is back! Looks like they will keep it alive with a lower frequency of updates to the site. I had reported their shut down a while ago. Glad to see them back in the Monkey saddle.

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July 10, 2004

Successfully deploying a content management system

James Robertson has posted another great article on content management systems: Successfully deploying a content management system. This quote sums up what the piece covers:

Our experience has shown that there are five key elements that must be addressed in a content management project:

strategy

change & communications

content

design

technology

The following sections discuss each of these five key elements, and give some examples of activities that should be considered.

The Role of Technology in a CMS Selection Process

James Robertson has published a briefing on Specifying technology in a CMS tender. I agree with his overall premise but have a few comments on some of the specifics. First a quote:

In short, by focusing on the technology aspects, these tenders often fail to select the best product, and don’t deliver the desired business benefits.

For this reason, we encourage those developing tenders to concentrate on the business requirements, and minimise the technical details.

That being said, there is a legitimate need to specify specific technology issues. This briefing presents some guidelines for doing so, in a way that will generate the best outcomes.

The main point, that the technology is irrelevant if you don’t have criteria that will support your overall business objectives, is right on the money. Assuming you have that part down, I think it is very important to play to your IT strengths if at all possible.

One factor not mentioned specifically in the article is that CMS’ are typically high-maintenance beasts (in my experience). If it is running on a platform for which you already have experienced admins, your life will be much easier. There are a lot of not very well documented tweaks and tricks to keep servers and systems running optimally. You’ll need knowledgable admins for a CMS that bears significant load.

Also, staff expertise in the CMS coding language is more important than given here, I think. Without it you are completely at the mercy of contractors to make modifications, no matter how minor. If you have one or more staff who know the language you can make the minor adjustments that tend to come up pretty frequently without having to spend consulting money nor take the time to secure the resources. You can be more nimble by making those small adjustments yourself and save the cash for major development and integration projects.

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April 16, 2004

Gmail

Tim O’Reilly has deconstructed all the hoohaw over the new Gmail service from Google: The Fuss About Gmail and Privacy: Nine Reasons Why It’s Bogus.

I’ve been trying out the beta for a few days and I’m pretty impressed with the features it has and with the quality of the links (sponsored and otherwise) that they discretely display when you view a message. Check out what O’Reilly has to say if you are still concerned about it.

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March 8, 2004

The Quality of Your Indexers Matters

Came across these 12-year old stats recently:

Bad news I think…

1. If two groups of people construct thesauri in a particular subject area, the overlap of index terms will only be 60%.

2. Two indexers using the same thesaurus on the same document use common index terms in only 30% of cases.

3. The output from two experienced database searchers has only 40% overlap.

4. Experts’ judgements of relevance concur in only 60% of cases.

[Source: JAA Sillince, 1992, Literature searching with unclear objectives: a new approach using argumentation. On-line Review, 16 (6), 391-409]

I think that just goes to show that the quality and knowledge of your indexers (human or otherwise) is incredibly important.

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March 8, 2004

The Day the Webmonkey Died

That day was a couple of weeks ago, apparently. Webmonkey ceases publication after a final round of layoffs.

The how-to content of the Webmonkey site is what got me rolling in my early efforts at developing web pages in the ’90s. I haven’t used the site as a reference in years but I’m bummed that it’s finally gone kaput.

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February 13, 2004

Article on Standards-based Design

I just came across this article from last year by Jeffrey Veen on the business value of web standards. Nice summary of the benefits.

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June 4, 2003

Article on Basic Definition of CMS

James Robertson has published an article that provides a concise and basic introduction to content management systems. This is a great piece to refer to management and others who you need to get up to speed on what exactly a CMS is and the general business problems to which it can be applied.

So, what is a CMS?

A content management system (CMS) is critical to the success of almost every website and intranet, and yet many organisations are not familiar with this technology.

So, while we have written many articles on a range of specific CMS issues and strategies, we now take a step back to answer the question: what is a content management system?

In this article we will focus on web content management, and will only touch upon broader content issues at the end of the document.

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May 7, 2003

Finding the Knowledge in a CMS

James Robertson: Where is the knowledge in a CMS?

Interestingly, the knowledge is not in the content itself. Instead, it’s in the processes and practices that surround a content management system.

This article puts forth the idea that the configuration and design for a content management system deployment contains valuable knowledge, more so than the raw content that is loaded into it. In order to deploy a complex system like this you have to learn about how your organization operates, what it is trying to achieve, and collaborate to develop a solution to support those efforts. Very valuable knowledge that should be preserved.

The lesson I take away from this: document your CMS deployment processes and research and archive it for reading later by those who follow you (or yourself five years later). You need to capture the ‘why’s of how you designed things since they may not be obvious to someone maintaining or updating the system who was not involved in the original project. A project blog would do this nicely.

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July 24, 2002