Alt Tags

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CMS Do's and Don'ts

Have you made peace with your Content Management System yet? If you’re like most CMS users, the answer is ‘no’ (or a steady stream of expletives that could easily be understood as a ‘no’). For many, CMS has become synonymous with the word ‘failure’.

There seems to be a widely held perception that CMS is a losing proposition. As a result, many corporations and government agencies have hesitated to make a commitment to CMS. A surprising number of corporate and government websites use no CMS at all, or a mixed up assortment of homegrown tools that can only loosely be referred to as a CMS.

Depending on their circumstances these organizations may not be able to resist the lure of a true CMS for much longer. There are hundreds of CMS vendors competing for the available market share. If you are not yet using a CMS it’s only a matter of time before a key decision maker in your organization gets sold on the idea. You know how it is when management latches onto buzzwords.

CMS doesn’t have to be synonymous with failure. There is no doubt that the right CMS, properly implemented, can offer real benefits to organizations of all sizes. The catch seems to be that it’s not always easy to find the right CMS, let alone a qualified team with the skills needed for a proper implementation.

As businesses of all sizes embark on their first CMS project they need to realize that they are venturing into territory that in many ways is unique. A CMS implementation is not quite like any other technology project. If for no other reason because the end result is a system that is used to manage what will essentially become the public face of your organization.

With this in mind I offer a few do’s and don’ts that could help you minimize your chances of joining the ranks of those who are unhappy with their CMS.
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Muddling Through

True story: During a recent ad hoc user survey, I quizzed my sister-in-law about her browser preferences. Given the fact that she’s happily using OS X on a late-model iBook, I wasn’t surprised to hear that her primary browser is Safari . . . except when she checks the weather. For that, she uses Internet Explorer. At first I thought she might be getting weather updates from some strange source that only works with Internet Explorer. Upon further questioning, I learned that Internet Explorer is set to use My Yahoo as its start page. Since My Yahoo reports the weather for her hometown, she knows she can easily get the latest weather report by simply opening Internet Explorer.

I explained that she could easily set My Yahoo to be her Safari start page, but she wanted no part of that idea. She only uses My Yahoo when she needs to check the weather — all she has to do is open Internet Explorer. She acknowledges that she could probably setup a bookmark or a toolbar link, but her current approach works, so she’s not going to spend too much time worrying about it. She gets the desired results even if her approach isn’t logical or streamlined. I should also mention that, as a recent Stanford grad, she’s not a dumb person. In fact, my guess is that she’s a pretty typical web user.
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The Sad State Of Accessibility On Municipal Websites

I created my first government website in 1995. In those days the Woody Allen quote was pretty much accurate: 80% of success was just showing up. Having a web site earned a city bragging rights, even if the site was nothing more than a home page with a few links.

As the decade progressed and web authoring tools became commonplace, most cities advanced to the point where they had at least a token web presence. While the sites were primitive when compared to commercial websites, local government saw the Internet as revolutionary. Suddenly there was this great tool that could be used to quickly disseminate all kinds of information to the community. Best of all, the medium was relatively cheap. There was incredible excitement about this new high tech, cost effective information delivery method.

Needless to say, accessibility was not a consideration in the early days of the web. As we discovered in our recent survey of municipal web accessibility, it’s not much of a consideration today, either, despite the pressing needs of each agency’s constituency. Of the 408 California cities we tested, 91% failed to achieve Section 508 compliance. The numbers were nearly as bad for the WCAG guidelines, with 89% of the sites failing to achieve WCAG’s Priority 1.
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The Invisible Web: A Survey Of Municipal Web Accessibility

Alt Tags recently conducted a series of accessibility tests on 408 municipal websites throughout the state of California. Ninety-one percent of the sites tested failed Section 508 compliance. Eight-Nine percent did not pass WCAG Priority 1. While not surprising, our findings were not encouraging. It appears that web accessibility is not yet on the radar of most municipalities.

Our complete report details our findings and recommendations for municipalities wishing to improve the accessibility of their websites. We’re presenting our report in a PDF format and encouraging readers to pass this on to interested parties in hopes that we can raise awareness of this important issue.

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Does Microsoft Care About Web Standards?

The question must seem absurd. After all, Microsoft is a member of the W3C and an active participant in the development of web standards. Each new Microsoft product announcement seems to include more standards compliant buzzwords than the last. True, Microsoft doesn’t always deliver complete standards compliance, but nobody’s perfect. At least they’re trying. Or are they?

While Microsoft may pay lip service to web standards, a look at their product line suggests they have no interest in supporting the standards they’ve helped create. Face it, xHTML and CSS just aren’t as sexy as .Net and web services. Microsoft clearly has other priorities and a closer investigation of the facts seems to indicate that support for web standards is hardly a blip on their corporate radar.

Allow me to elaborate with a few examples:

Microsoft.com: Any discussion about Microsoft’s support for web standards should begin with their corporate website. If Microsoft cared about web standards, you would expect them to use those standards on their own website. You’d probably even expect their home page to validate (or at least come close). Instead, Microsoft can’t even be bothered to declare a doctype.

I realize valid HTML is a controversial topic. We all know how hard it is to keep a site valid. One day your site validates, the next day some stray entity or attribute throws your site out of compliance. My point is that those of us who are serious about web standards make an effort. Microsoft’s failure to declare a doctype on their home page indicates they’ve made no effort.

Dig deeper into the source code of Microsoft.com and you’ll find one coding atrocity after another (font tags, nested tables, and embedded images that simulate a styled list, etc.). It’s as if the developers of Microsoft.com have no clue what CSS is, let alone how to use it. To Microsoft’s credit, they seem to be using their own tools to create and maintain their website. My problem with those tools is that they encourage the worst sort of design habits. They certainly don’t encourage the use of web standards. Which leads me to . . .
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