punkk — Fri, 18 Jan 2002 23:17:20 +0000

Well i think it all goes down to who's going to support your CMS. after all is said an done, will your org support it or will the developers who you hired provide support?

The actual cost of the software may not be much but the cost of the professional services could be twice if not three times as much.

I'm currently in the middle of an implementaion of a CMS for one of the top 3 grocery retailers in north america. We have 13 subsidiaries (sp?) all with internal and external sites. some of the intranet content is managed by corporate and some by the division. Not only that but we have an online grocery shopping website about to rollout. My point is, we need something like a CMS to keep track of our 150,000+ web page artifacts and 1800+ content creators, do you?

I would say empowering your content creators with regular templates that have some SSI's within a dreamweaver interface would be sufficient. How many content creators are you actually managing?

from the sound of it, going with a CMS not not be the best option for you. it may just be cheaper to maintain the website yourself with a limited amount of content creators.

good luck
PUNKK

Dunno!

Sparklebug — Tue, 15 Jan 2002 04:51:16 +0000

Thanks for your responses.

At present we have only basic web development skills in the organisation, but these have been rapidly increasing since we dumped our previous web developers and have spent the last few months fixing up all of their mistakes and implementing new functionality. I am responsible for managing the site - so do currently work on it regularly - and will be undertaking some part time postgraduate studies which focus upon web design, which should also assist greatly in the learning curve (currently completely self directed!).

My own philosophy is that we maintain it as much as possible internally to give us as much flexibility as possible and the ability to implement and sort things out as quickly as possible whenever the need arises. I'm wary of getting into the mess we were in up until recently with all sorts of problems which we unaware of and had no idea how to fix ourselves. We are a very small not-for-profit organisation and want the site to be a big part of our future - but without it sending us bankrupt!

However ... I do wonder if there is a bit of selfishness creeping in ... am I just not keen on a CMS because I personally would like to get in and learn a lot and do as much as I can? And what does it mean when I leave?

If this helps answer the question, then great. If not, oh well!

Bug

Gurudev — Tue, 15 Jan 2002 04:22:43 +0000

Like Suzanne said, it totally depends upon your needs, the function of the site, available resources and your budget. It is a very genral question to give a specific answer. If you have knowledgeable people who can work on the site often then you may not need a CMS and vice-versa. You have to account for a lot of factors here.

Suzanne — Tue, 15 Jan 2002 02:19:15 +0000

It depends on the CMS being used. If they are building it from scratch and it basically just takes your input and puts it in a nice document, it's probably worth it for you. If it's really involved and has all manner of options, it might be more than you need.

Unfortunately, CMS are just really coming into their own at the moment, so you have everything from free to hundreds of thousands of dollars (and the "free" ones will require hours of customization).

It's hard to say.

Suzanne