It can happen anywhere, at any time. You’re doing your job, minding your own business, and it suddenly dawns on you: you’re the company’s webmaster.
There was a time when the title referred to someone who built the corporate website and managed its content, but today those are largely two different things. Many firms have decided it’s cheaper and easier to hire an outside firm to do the site building and hosting, while internal staff deal with the information that’s put up on the Web.
These people can range from vice-presidents of marketing and communications to junior admin staff and (in some small businesses) the CEO. They find themselves trying to figure out how to use a myriad off-the-shelf content management systems (CMS) such as Adobe’s Contribute, or troubleshoot custom-developed suites.
In a recent issue of The Content Wrangler, consultant Michael Silverman offers a great cheat sheet for understanding how these systems work – and more importantly how to get the budget approval for them.
Mr. Silverman distinguishes between the two most common types of systems: “A page-based CMS allows you to edit the page in context.
Each page is a separate unit which can be modified individually,” he writes. “An asset-based CMS stores information as blocks of texts called assets. These individual assets are then related to each other to automatically build pages. In an asset-based system, the article’s title, byline and body might each be considered a separate asset.”
More experienced users can keep up to date on ways to save money or improve content-management efforts by looking at The CMS Report, an online magazine that links to several relevant blogs.
Less experienced users, though, should scan two useful tutorials that deal with common content management problems. If you’re stuck using file transfer protocol, or FTP, you may get some good advice from Essential Keystrokes , while PC Tips in a Box just posted a tutorial on how to speed up file transfers.
And as anyone who’s used a content management system knows, the quicker you can get this job done, the better.
