If you’ve poked around our organization’s websites at all you are aware that we have a lot of different brands and identities for the various ministries we support. We talk a lot about the differences between being a House of Brands and a Branded House (see Mike Davis’s post about that here.) Well, along with that approach comes a de-centralized communications and marketing strategy - our ministries are ultimately responsible for the information they communicate and for creating their identity. Our web team gets involved as early in the process as we can, but they are the experts at their ministry and they understand their audience better than we do, so we defer to them on decisions regarding content and communication. We are there to provide the expertise on web technologies and communication strategies, and to help the ministry reach their audience as best we can.
Since we’re aiming to help our ministry customers reach their audience, we find ourselves constantly addressing the issue of Content Management. At the onset of a new project we meet with our internal ministry customer and discuss their content needs. The following questions help us determine what the best approach might be:
- What content on the site is dynamic and what is static?
- How often will the dynamic content change?
- And, most importantly, who will own the responsibility for updating the dynamic content?
The answers to these questions help us to determine if a Content Management System is needed, or if it would be simpler to just handle content updates through our support team. If there is limited dynamic content and it only changes twice a year it’s much easier to just code those changes with our technical support resources. But if there will be constant updates to many pages, then it’s certainly worth the effort to deploy a CMS and train the ministry users on how to update their content.
This, of course, leads to a discussion of different CMS platforms, and there are a ton of comparisons online and an extensive listing on Wikipedia. Our two favorites at the moment are WordPress and Expression Engine. We are using both of those platforms fairly extensively, and they each have their advantages and disadvantages; but that’s a discussion for another time.
July 17th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
We didn’t have one before, but we’re switching to WordPress now. One of our sites is on WP but our main site is in the re-design process.
http://www.thrivebaltimore.net
http://www.communitycc.net
I liked Expression Engine…..until WPmu came out
August 28th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
We use the content management features built into Arena. They lack some of the polish of pure-play CMS systems but the ability to leverage the membership data and modules has been incredible esp. for things like event registrations, serving options, giving and group communities.
I heard you guys are moving in the direction of Arena for membership. if we can ever answer questions for you don’t hesitate to ask.
August 28th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Thanks, Jon - we are just getting started with our Arena implementation, so we appreciate the input. I’m sure we’ll reach out at some point as we get further on in the project.