Website Development Best Practices

Tricks to deploying a new CMS

There are tricks to quickly deploying a CMS that make the business side of organizations very thankful because the new site is up and running quickly and efficiently - and make the IT side of the business happy because it doesn't involve changing the architecture, a lot of extra resources, downtime or troubleshooting.  Here are a few tips and tricks I have learned and implemented over the years:

• Create high content turnover pages in your new CMS. In one organization I worked for we separated the homepage from the rest of the website. With its custom CMS on the homepage and first few pages, we were able to upload and change high volume content rapidly without interfering with the java application that ran the rest of the site.

• Business Benefits: Resulted in a win-win for the business side that could rapidly and easily change content at any time. Technical side win-win with a readily deployed CMS.

• Insert your new CMS site into the existing corporate site. When your site is created in the new CMS, simply insert it into the existing corporate website or intranet by relinking.  Usually a new site built in a CMS consists of a few layers: homepage, Level 1, 2 and 3 webpages. These pages can be inserted within the existing corporate site or intranet then linked to other pages within the existing corporate website or intranet.

• Business Benefits: Branding and layout for the new CMS is set up to look the same as the corporate site or intranet, so for the client or user it is a seamless experience. This trick saves months and sometimes years of development effort.