The "Occasional CMS User" Myth - or... People Don't Like Updating Their Own Content

Relevant Article: The Myth of the Occasional CMS User

Often, one of the big justifications for a CMS is removing the webmaster bottleneck and delegating content entry to the people who have the information. The implicit assumption is that everyone wants to directly maintain their portion of the website but technology is standing in the way. But if you visit a CMS customer a while after implementation you are likely to find that the responsibility of adding content is still concentrated in a relatively small proportion of the employee population.

Unfortunately, this is almost always the case. There are rare occasions when people really do take ownership of their site/content, but typically, I'll be asked by someone to set up a system where they can easily edit their own content.

I spend a lot of hours doing this work, then they pay me a nice amount of money, then they progress to send me information to post to their website. Granted, I get more work out of this, and it's easier for me to update the content as well, but, frankly, I find it to be a waste of my time.

If you want to manage your own content, then manage your own content. Don't waste your money on a CMS if you're going to use a 'webmaster' or whatever you want to call the person.

Comments

This is EXACTLY my own experience. At first, the users are saying "This is awesome! I can do it myself! Yay!" But six months later, they're saying "Can you update the text on the news page?" :(