Content Management System (CMS) ROI – Not Just About Cutting Costs Anymore
- The cost of CMS software has decreased exponentially since 2000
- Site visitor expectations have increased exponentially since 2000
Can a CMS save you money?
Yes, and that is easy to calculate.
On the direct cost side, the ROI calculation is pretty much the same as it was – figure out how much your organization spends on the technical aspects of updating your website’s content. For example, if your marketing department sends Word documents off to a contract web development team every week for them to post the content to the web, that is your current cost of content management. You can easily compare that to a quote on implementing your website within a content management system and determine a clear, financial return on investment.
Given the low cost of purchasing and implementing a content management system in 2009, it does not take much spending on an external developer to realize that a CMS is a financially sound choice – of course you can cut costs by implementing a CMS.
But the real question is… Can a CMS make you money?
Yes, but the calculation is harder.
I mentioned earlier that something else has changed in the past nine years – that website visitors have incredibly high expectations of every online experience. In 2000, there was a lot of “hope” that the web would transform our world. Well it has happened and that “hope” has turned into “expectation”. We buy music on and listen to it only seconds after purchase. We can reach out to an old friend on and get a reply only seconds later. We ask questions that get answers instantly. So what does this mean for your website and what in the world does it have to do with a content management system? Why is a Y2K website no longer good enough?
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Consistent User Experience
Visitors expect a usable, consistent experience when navigating a website. Without a content management system in place, even great web developers can have a hard time maintaining a consistent experience when they are dealing with hundreds of HTML files. As time goes on, the user experience on this kind of site will become inconsistent.Implementing a CMS not only saves money on content entry, but also pours a core user experience foundation for the entire site. So for example, when you create a new page, you can focus on the content and not have to worry about adding a new link to the navigation and making sure the color is right. The CMS takes care of these things and forces your site to have a consistent user experience.
Beyond the user, visitors such as Google also crave a consistent user experience. They like valid XHTML and CSS. They like UL>LI structured navigation systems. They like regular site maps and . This all may be over your head, but they are all things that your CMS can keep tidy as you add new pages and content to your site.
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Fresh New Content
Fact: When you pay someone specifically to handle the technical parts of content management, the creation of new content can become stagnated. The content management process becomes lazy. The website becomes a burden. Changes happen very slowly or in many cases they don’t happen at all.Clearly this is no time for laziness. Your visitors won’t accept an event calendar that is out of date, and they will wonder if you are still in business if your last “latest news” item is from three years ago. This is reality.
Similarly, our search engine friends scour the web every day looking for new stuff – they just don’t care about those pages that were created years ago.
What does this mean for me?
A user is more likely to take an interest in your company or organization if they have a clean user experience on your website and if you show some sign of life. They are also more likely to buy your product or service and find your product or service in a major search engine. We firmly believe that implementation of a CMS can make these things a reality and can help change the website mentality in an organization to a positive, highly dynamic one.
CMS tools can be a joy to use, and they will encourage and enable the generation of more better content.
While the specific financial effects will differ from company-to-company, implementing a content management system is about much more than just saving money. Whether you are hoping your website can attract your next member, donor, or customer, we think implementing a CMS can have a substantial top line impact in the current economic climate. And when we get through the current doldrums you will have one heck of a platform to build upon.
Have a CMS? Is it doing more than saving you money? Tell us about it in the comments!
Great points, Chris.
I’ve done a bunch of static content site updates for clients before and was often amazed by how much stress and effort people just assumed went along with updating their website. The e-mails, the word documents, the phone calls…. It is all effort and stress that people assume comes with owning a website - but it really doesn’t have to exist. This is a very real and often overlooked intangible cost that, when coupled with the $ cost-per-static-update, make moving to a CMS even more attractive.
One other big thing that has changed in the last decade or so is the quality of content management systems. I did some work years ago implementing a site in Ektron 300 for a client and it did not work out very well; The CMS interface was pretty clunky and the result took a long time for employees to adapt to. In the recent years since then, however, the technical aspects of all CMSs have gotten nailed down and so CMS designers have spent a lot of effort hardening their tools for the end user.
BrianT - You are right, not only has the cost of these systems gone down but the quality and usability is far superior to what we had even just a few years ago. Wordpress, for example, is free open source software and (in my opinion) one of the easiest to use web publishing tools out there.