How to avoid making costly mistakes when investing in a publisher content management system was the subject of the latest Press Gazette Future of Media Explained podcast.
Here are the key insights from the broadcast, which was sponsored by the UK’s only WordPress VIP Gold partner – Big Bite.
1) Choose the right solution for your editorial team
Andy Macharg, chief technology officer at Hello! Magazine, spoke about the challenges he has faced replacing decade-old content infrastructure at the title.
He said: “I’ve come from 20-odd years of development experience, I’ve built CMSs, bought CMSs, I’ve done open-source CMSs.
“Each time you’ve got to decide what is right for the audience and the audience being the editorial team. Get the audience satisfied and everything else becomes easier…
“How do we simplify and how do we move things forward. For us it’s going to be a built CMS [Glide Publishing Platform], it takes away complexity, we don’t have to think about upgrades and we can concentrate on content.”
2) Building your own CMS has benefits, but whole business needs to buy in
Larry Chevres, vice president of software engineering at CNN, said: “CNN has a completely custom system. The key elements are scalability, speed, flexibility for distribution and the high number of stakeholders…
“A key element is the commitment that the company has… A commitment to go down the custom road requires a complete understanding from the business as to what that means so you don’t end up in the situations that a lot of companies have ended up with where they have to clean up a mess.
“Our home page can be managed by 15 to 20 people at the same time, all working on different elements…They all need to know about what actions are going on via a real-time communications system. Those elements have led us to a lot of customisation.”
3) Choose a solution that fits your monetisation strategy
Sanjay Ravindran, chief information officer at New Statesman Media Group, said: “The place I start with is strategy and monetisation. What is your strategy for the business? And that will dictate your technology choices.
“We knew we had to support multiple websites. We had a different monetisation path which is not your standard.
“We decided on WordPress because it has core functionality which is tried and tested and we knew you wouldn’t have to worry about it. But we knew we would have to build on top of that which is what we did.”
4) Beware company politics
Jason Agnew, technical director of Big Bite, said: “One of the most important things is company politics. Sometimes people won’t admit that the current solution is wrong if they were involved in the build.”
5) And avoid vendor lock
Agnew added: “If you are going to build something and you become attached to that vendor that’s a difficult position to leave. You want to be somewhere where you can change who you are using at any point. There has to be no vendor lock at all.”
Picture: AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post via Getty Images
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