In today’s constant-distraction-and-huge-todo-list culture, it’s extremely easy to get sidetracked by things that aren’t vital to achieving your goals.

Here are some simple tips for making sure you’re not wasting a large percentage of your time on things that don’t matter.

#1 Gather Your Todos

I use Remember the Milk to record all my todos. I group them by projects and then assign due dates and priorities. They also have a great iPhone app which syncs automatically with the web app.

Whether you use Remember the Milk or another tool, it’s super important to write things down as soon as you think of them. If you don’t, then you’ll constantly be plagued by the feeling that you’re forgetting something (I have over 500 tasks currently active in Remember the Milk).

#2 Organize Your Todos on Monday Morning

A sure-fire way to waste 50% of your time is to charge into the week without organizing your todo list and inbox. There will be hundreds of things shouting for your attention and you need to proactively choose which things are important to you – not things that other people say are important for you to do. As someone once said …

Your email inbox is a todo list that anyone can write to.

Here’s how to organize your todo list:

1. Block off the first hour of every Monday to organize your todo list. Turn off instant messenger, close email and silence your phone. You need absolute silence so you can focus. I tend to do this from 5am – 6am on Monday mornings, before my wife and son wake up.
2. Go through the todo lists for all your current projects (in Remember the Milk in this example) and pick important things that you need to do this week. Prioritize them and assign them a due date this week, or tag them with ‘thisweek’.
3. Use a tool like TadaLists.com and create a list called ‘This Week’. It’s important that this is separate from your main repository of todos (Remember the Milk in this example).
4. Take a deep breath and ask yourself “What are the things that I could work on this week that will get me closer to my longterm, important goals?”. (These things may not even be on your Remember the Milk todo lists.)
5. Put several of these things on your ‘This Week’ list in TadaList and prioritize them by putting the most important things first. Make sure these are atomic, do-able things (not big concepts like ‘Increase signups by 3%’).
6. Go back to Remember the Milk (or whatever tool you’re using) and filter it by tasks due this week.
7. Pick several of the important ones and copy them over to your ‘This Week’ list in TadaList.
8. Close Remember the Milk and only refer to the small ‘This Week’ TadaList for the rest of the week.

What you’ll find is that you had a ton of things that you were supposed to do this week (in your Remember the Milk list) but only 10 or 20 of them are really important. Those 10 or 20 items should be added to your TadaList. At that point, I’d close your Remember the Milk list, and only look at your TadaList for the rest of the week.

Another reason to distill your huge weekly todo list down into a smaller list is that it will keep you motivated and excited, as you’re consistently finishing your todos for the day, instead of having 15 undone items at the end of the day.

Here’s a screenshot of an example TadaList. Note that I’ve created a pretend item called ‘==== END TODAY =====’. This helps me see what I’m supposed to complete today, and feel good about it once they’re all done.

#3 Stick to Your Guns

The most important thing is to stick to your simple ‘This Week’ todo list (the TadaList in this example) and not get distracted when new things get thrown at you. Just remember that you have control over what you’re doing and whether it’s helping you move towards your longterm, important goals.

Don’t waste 50% of your time on things that don’t matter.

For sometime now I’ve dreamed of creating useful software for my fellow designers and developers. Recently I’ve spent my time turning that dream into a reality. I’m not an expert or a billionaire, just an average guy wanting to share my experience with you in hopes you can take something valuable away from it. Enjoy.

Dissecting The CMS

The Problem

Somehow the three letters — C-M-S — when put together bring about completely opposite feelings in people. Some adore them and some abhor them. I’ve always been somewhere in between.

One of the main reasons I was never sold on any Content Management System was that last word: System. As a designer I don’t like having to hack up my beautiful design to try and get it to work with -fill_in_the_blank- CMS. It is the rigidness in the idea of a “system” that never seemed to work with me.

The Solution

Enter the CMT (Content Management Tool). Three years ago when all of my clients started needing “dynamic” websites that they could update themselves, I was forced to spend all my free time writing my CMT. It worked great, extremely hacky, hardly any features, but great. As my client list grew, so did the amount of hacks and feature additions for my CMT. Over the course of those two and a half years I had re-designed the interface twice. Eventually I realized, “Hey I really have something here.” And in January of 2008 I started re-designing and re-developing my CMT from scratch. All code thrown out the window, and built from the bottom up. Today it is know as: Firerift.

Firerift is in my answer to the CMS problem. I took the way I normally develop a site, from Photoshop all the way to deployment, and built something that compliments the process. Not something that constrains me to work within a certain “pre-designed” system. Let’s take a deeper look at the way I feel a CMS works best (especially for all of you designers and developers who share my thoughts on this CMS problem).

For this next part I am going to need you to forget about what the typical CMS does, because Firerift works differently. You see, Firerift is a Template Independent CMS. That means you design and/or develop how you want, and then plug Firerift into the portions of the site where you want it to manage that content. Firerift will scour your code looking for any Firerift Code Snippets and convert them into the corresponding function.

For example, the following is a simple blog page using Firerift:

<html>
<head>
	<title>My Site</title>
</head>
<body>
	<h1>Welcome to My Site</h1>
	<p>I hope you enjoy my Blog</p>
	{{blog}}
</body>
</html>

Firerift will find that “{{blog}}” reference and convert it into a full featured blog that is 100% managed from within the Firerift admin. Now this example is very simplified, there would be more parameters added to the “{{blog}}” (like which blog to pull down). But for simplicity sake, this is pretty much all it takes.

So you can see the flexibility that Firerift offers, you designate what gets to be managed in the admin. This lets you design and code however you want, there are no limits or template restrictions. Also, you have access to the XHTML structure of every function (blog, galleries, etc.) from within the admin. Allowing you to output the data in any fashion. Alternatively you can create “Pages“, allowing you to manage the whole site inside the admin, rather than just portions. It is this “anti-system” that enabled me to easily build truly custom websites for my clients.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Content Management without template restrictions.

Expendability

A big problem I think CMS’s are prone to is “feature bloat”. You look up in the menu and there are ten links, and each links has 454 sub links (a mild exaggeration). One way I think this can be solved is by creating a CMS “Core” that is powerful and offers only a handful of great features, but also give the core the ability to be extended. This eliminates feature bloat out of the box and gives users a powerful but simple interface. Then if you decide you need more functionality, you can install extensions or plug-ins. This gives you the ability to determine the complexity of your CMS.

Firerift enables any developer (really … any developer at all) to create plug-ins or extensions for Firerift. Developers can then package up and post these plug-ins or extensions on the Firerift website to share with the community. Thus making Firerift a CMN (Content Management Network – watch out I’ve got a lot of these acronyms). What does an extension do in Firerift? It literally extends the functionality of the software itself. Meaning, you can add features to Firerift.

I can’t say all this and act like I came up with the idea, because I didn’t. Many people before me have used this great idea, and I have to give a shout out to Shaun Inman. What he has done with Mint perfectly demonstrates this.

Design

Ease of use is huge if you are going to be spending a lot of time in a particular application. Also, let’s not forget about the fact that some small business owner is the one who will be updating his website everyday. Good, intuitive design is a must if you are going to be handing the reigns of a CMS over to your (technically UN-inclined) client. That was a top priority on the latest re-design of the Firerift admin. By keeping the design similar from page to page, using panels for information sets, and by using clean and clear design the end-user will feel comfortable and know where he/she is at all times.

Wrapping It Up

A Template Independent CMS is the best CMS in my opinion. Firerift was developed as a solution to my problem, making it a very useful piece of software for me. I understand that Firerift may not be for every project, because some people prefer the “system” architecture. But for those who develop like I do, I hope Firerift will be as big of an asset to you as it has been for me.

The Business Side of Things

Going solo and creating a new web app is always fun and exciting. You are the boss, so you decide how things work, what goes where, and when things need to get done. Exciting, challenging and fun. Then the preposterous idea of selling your creation to others who may find it useful pops in your mind. Your brain immediately takes you to a magical land where you have an infinite amount of money, a 400,000 sq. ft. home, and you never need to work again because your creation generates “passive” income. Suddenly you snap back into reality with even more determination to make your project the greatest app ever put into code.

Now to clarify, I am not all about money or anything. In fact I love where I am in life and I know for a fact money will never bring happiness. But that&rsqou;s not to say that at some point we don’t all have a passing thought like the one above!

After the “high” of developing your own web app wears off and you are stuck in front of your computer writing the (what seems like) 1 millionth line of code for the fourth time over, the question hits you, “How am I, -your_name_here-, going to distribute, support, market, and sell this app all by myself?” The task can seem daunting, and here is how I went about it.

The Product

I started creating Firerift, a template independent CMS, about 3 years ago with no initial intention of releasing it to the public. I only used it for my client’s websites. As things progressed I decided I wanted to release it to the public. “But how?” I thought. “The code is too hacky. What if someone looks under the hood? How can I provide support for users? How am I supposed to legally protect my app? What kind of lawyer knows anything about the web industry? How do I market this to my target market?” All these questions and more were on the front of my mind.

The Connections

One thing I knew for sure, I needed to get some help developing this app so it can be rock solid and expanded upon in the future. I am not the greatest developer, I was not even using a framework for Firerift when I started out. I was just using the “Drew Wilson Framework” (which basically involves a lot of embedded MYSQL). I knew this was not as solid as something Google would do for example, and I wanted it to be. Luckily I know a genius developer fluent in pretty much any language, not limited to just web languages. Basically if I could have anyone in the world write Firerift with me, it would be him. He already had a great job, and I didn’t have any money to pay him. But I knew it would be well worth it to have his expertise. So I went looking for some money.

The Money

“How much should I get?” I had no idea. But I knew that I did not want to get into serious debt over this. After all, I have an amazing wife and not so amazing mortgage to take care of. I knew that any advertising at all would be the dumbest waste of money. My target market is web developers. They are on the web 24/7 and you don’t need an ad on TechCrunch to get their traffic. There are plenty of other free alternatives. Design Gallery sites, ask others to blog about it, etc.

I knew I would be doing part-time freelance work on the side while doing Firerift at the same time. So I figured I needed the amount my developer would charge plus 2 months of full living expenses. Why only two months? Because before I would take the money I would get as much done in my spare time as possible, while still freelancing part-time. This really helped a ton. I built the Firerift public website, wrote some documentation, did all the final design for and basic XHTML/CSS, everything I knew I could do on my own and didn’t need extra money for. That way I could take out a smaller loan. Then I started the final development phase with my developer for the next 2 months. It worked out great. Oh there were bumps, and not everything went as planned, but that is just fine when creating your first app. It should be a learning experience. I now know a ton more than before, and have a very solid idea of how to approach my next app.

The bottom line when taking out a loan or borrowing money is: make sure you are comfortable. There is always going to be an element of risk (that’s what makes us entrepreneurs), but be smart about it. Ask advice from every successful business person you have a relationship with. And when selecting a developer/designer/whatever make sure it is someone you trust and is better than you at whatever you are hiring them for. Hire up, not down.

The Legal Issues

During those 2 months I had to get the business side of things built up. One of the items I went for first was licensing. Art Neill and his team of lawyers at New Media Rights were awesome at helping me get the licensing issues all worked out for Firerift. They specialize in the tech and media industry, so it was a perfect fit. I was lucky enough to meet them at the San Diego BarCamp. BarCamp is a great way to meet other web industry peeps.

One important tip is to ask. Ask other people in the industry you respect what they have done. It can be very helpful to get knowledge from people who have already experienced the trials of developing a business.

Support

I want Firerift to be easy to use for developers of all skill levels. One of the most frustrating things for me when I started out developing was the lack of documentation or the unfriendly way the documentation was written on various apps or software. If I had it my way, there would have been someone there to walk me through step by step.

Enter the “screencast”. An awesome way to help developers of all levels understand and better use your software. I will be creating literally as many ScreenCasts as I can for Firerift, to help make using and customizing Firerift as simple as possible. It can be very time consuming, but worth it I think in the end. The best ScreenCast software out there is ScreenFlow, hands down.

All Said & Done

So by creating Firerift I have solved my CMS woes, and hopefully yours as well. All this being said, soon I would like to declare Independence Day for all of my fellow designers and developers. Because soon Firerift will be available available at: www.firerift.com

We all know content management systems (CMS) can be beneficial for most websites. However, they do come with five hidden costs.

Many think of a content management system as a magic bullet that solves all of their content woes. Unfortunately the cost of a CMS is greater than its price tag. Before making a decision about whether to adopt a CMS, or indeed which CMS to choose, you first need to be aware of the hidden costs. These include:

1. The cost of training
2. The cost to quality
3. The cost to functionality
4. The cost of redundancy and flexibility
5. The cost of commitment

It is important that you understand the impact of each beginning with the cost of training.

The cost of training

Probably the most obvious hidden cost is that of training. No matter how well designed the application or how good the documentation, some level of training is normally required. In my experience training is particularly important with free open source systems. These tend to have less documentation and the interface is often designed by programmers rather than user experience experts. The result is a great learning curve.

The more content production is delegated, the more people it is necessary to train. Whether this is done through onsite training or video tutorials it is still a considerable cost.

Although training maybe an obvious expense it is not without surprises. Organisations often fail to consider that training has an ongoing cost. The more people using a system the higher the likelihood somebody will need to be replaced. This carries with it a cost in both time and money.

This ongoing cost is not limited to training new CMS users. Existing content provider also require refresher courses if they are not using the CMS regularly. I have often provided training for an organisation only to receive a call six months later because people have forgotten how to login. This is because they used the system so infrequently.

Unfortunately the price of having a lot of people editing your site is the cost of increased training. However, that is not the only cost that grows with numbers. So does the cost to quality.

The cost to quality

In some ways, what a CMS gives with one hand it takes away with the other. Quality and control are classic examples of this. Enterprise level content management systems have complex workflow tools that prevent new content from going live until it has been checked and double checked. This is designed specifically to ensure the quality of content being posted online.

The problem with this is two fold. First, this kind of functionality is only normally found in more expensive systems. Second, few organisations implement this kind of quality control because it creates a bottleneck in the approval process. This bottleneck is precisely the kind of problem a CMS was supposed to solve.

I think this highlights a substantial problem with content management systems. They are often implemented in the hope they will solve what is an organizational rather than technical problem. Unfortunately technology cannot solve everything.

At one extreme you can open up your CMS to allow anybody to post to your site. This will lead to a decline in the quality of your content. On the other you can limit access and create a bottleneck where only one or two individuals can make content live. The technology can offer you lots of options along that sliding scale. What you need to do is find a happy medium.

Of course, at least a CMS offers this control. That is more than an HTML driven website can. However, a non CMS driven site does allow more flexibility when it comes to functionality.

The cost to functionality

When you have a website that is not built on a CMS the possibilities are endless. Because you have complete control over your code, it is possible to build any additional functionality you require. However, once you commit to a content management system things become more complex.

Although it is possible to build additional functionality that sits alongside your CMS there can be problems with integration. For example, if your CMS does not have a forum and you wish to add one, you may have to ask users to login twice. Once for the site and once for the forum. Equally you may find it hard to tie your CMS in with other systems that you later purchase.

Some content management systems provide plugins to add additional functionality. However, often you are forced to either compromise or wait until the next release of the CMS and hope it supports your requirements.

Although you may find yourself frustrated by a lack of functionality, it is equally possible to be frustrated by too much.

The cost of redundancy and complexity

Unless you have a bespoke content management system, developed to your exact requirements it will probably contain functionality you do not need. That is because off the shelf solutions are designed to appeal to a wide audience.

Not only does this mean you pay for unwanted functionality, it also adds complexity to the user interface. The more functionality, the more complexity, the more to learn.

It is a problem that applications such as Microsoft Word have suffered from for years. Word is very powerful and provides an enormous range of features. The problem is that the majority of people only use a fraction of what is available. The result is that most pay for functionality they do not use, and struggle to learn what is a complex application. This is the problem many content management systems are facing.

The reason people have not stopped using Word and move instead to something simpler, is that they are invested both financially and in time. This brings us to the final drawback of content management systems.

The cost of commitment

Content management systems demand a high level of commitment on many fronts. These include:

• The upfront financial investment in implementing the system
• The cost and time involved in training staff
• The substantial amount of data entered into the system

The third area can be particularly tricky. Once your content is in a content management system it is not always a simple matter to get it out.

With such an investment in both time and money it is important to make the right selection of system. Changing your mind later is expensive.

So am I suggesting you should avoid content management systems entirely? Not at all. The benefits they provide are real and cannot be ignored. However, I am saying that you should go into the process of selecting a content management system with your eyes wide open. A content management system is not a magic bullet that solves all your content woes. However, it can be a useful tool if selected carefully.

We live in a time where people have an amazing amount of power when it comes to publishing. Blogging, podcasts, vidcasts (or whatever you call ‘em) and more have been put into the hands of millions and it’s changing the way we live and work.

Despite all of that, content management for the web remains a huge pain point for many individuals and businesses. The amount of time, effort and money that’s involved (and often wasted) to do things that are seemingly rather straightforward is astronomical. I mean, how hard does it have to be?

Content publishing and management can be extremely complex, and therefore not surprisingly hard to do. Having said that, the biggest problems with content management lie not in that complexity, but in how we approach our solutions.

How’s that for a paradox? Welcome to the world of content management.

So, where do we start looking for a better way to “do” content management? Let’s take a hard look at the issues; starting with how most of us perceive content management.

Content Management vs. CMS

Without wishing to state the obvious, content management needs to be all about the content. However, when most of us think (or talk, or read) about content management we are quick to associate it with a specific technology – the CMS.

That, my friends, is our first, and probably our biggest, mistake. “CMS” should in no way define content management. If you’re currently in content management = CMS mode you should really take the time to step back and look at what you’re doing. You may find out that you’re wasting time, money and effort on something that’s not providing much, if any, value.

There are four important pieces to the content management puzzle: content, people, process and technology. Let’s look at those individually.

Content Management is About Content

Well, now that we’ve pulled the “system” out, let’s look at defining “content.” Here’s where it gets tricky. Content can mean a lot of things. You could be publishing all sorts of content; pages, articles, mp3s, events, and so on. You could have a variety of different mediums (html, images, movies) all of which have a different way of being created, maintained, and published.

And that doesn’t even take into account semantic issues. What’s the difference between a “page” and an “article?” What about an article and a blog entry? A blog entry and a news item. Sometimes these may seem obvious, other times it’s not as clear.

There is no one clear definition for content – it’s different for every situation and it’s important to keep this in mind. Don’t let the content be defined by the technology, for example, that’s something that most content management systems will do for you (or to you!).

Content Management is About People

You need to have people in order to properly manage content. Content can’t be created by a system and it doesn’t manage itself. Pretty clear, right? I think so, yet I’m constantly amazed at how often the people aspect is left out of the solution.

I could write a book on how to create, manage and maintain content and it would begin with something about hiring the right people.

In order to do content right you’ve got to make sure there are people in place and that they’re set up to use the systems you have. Find out if you even need a CMS, for example. Sometimes you’ll find that by having people with the right skills in place eliminates the need for a “CMS” altogether. Instead you may want to deploy technology that helps with the process itself, or nothing at all, in effect using people instead of technology to manage your content.

I think many folks would be surprised at how much time, effort and money can be saved simply by putting people before technology when it comes to resources.

Content Management is A Process

I think this defines the term “content management” the best. It’s a process. Take a look at why people want to manage content. What are they trying to express? What are their goals? What are the real problems they’re having? How do they interact with technology? These questions should be answered before any sort of system or technical solution is applied.

I think we can safely assume that most people who actually have to work with content management don’t care too much about the technology, aside from whether or not it works well. They just want to correct an error, publish their thoughts, share their knowledge. In order to provide the best solution, we need to understand those goals first. Then we need to establish a solid process.

If the process is flawed everything that follows will also be flawed. Unfortunately what normally happens is the process is created around the technology, which is usually hard to use, and everything falls apart.

But enough of that, as my pal Sean said recently, “consulting on process could be an industry unto itself.” Let’s talk tech.

Content Management is About Technology

When it comes to content management, technology should be a means to an end. It should be a way to help people accomplish their goals. This can be done in many different ways and should not be limited to what we traditionally think of as a CMS.

I realize that the promise of a CMS as a suite of technologies to help people with content management is a good one. However, good intentions don’t always come with good results. When it comes to CMSs, this is usually a bit of an understatement.

The usual problem with that is most CMSs aren’t really built to address the specific needs and problems of the people and processes you’ll have in place. Even when geared to a specific type of content or industry they often miss the mark.

This can be the result of a few problems common to many “out-of-the-box” solutions:

• They’ve got an overly complicated feature-set. With most systems you’ve got a bunch of advanced features that don’t often get used. If they do it’s usually after someone’s spent tons of time learning the system. Heck, I don’t know how many times I’ve thought to myself, “I could teach the content contributors how to access static files and write XHTML quicker.” Regardless, if people don’t use the features, they’re not really useful.
• They’re too inflexible. They don’t allow for easy customization (in more ways than one) and require significant resources (time, effort and money) to mold them to what you want. Sometimes that can be as simple as getting the content to display correctly or getting the CSS to render as it should.
• They’re not tailored to the specific content you want to publish. Jeff Croft recently wrote a nice piece on personal content management that illustrates this well. He points out that, “the single biggest problem with content management is that personal CMS tools don’t facilitate structured data as well as they should. Instead, they give you a few fields and let you figure out how to best fit your content into them.” Very true, and this causes all sorts of problems.
• They’re too hard to use. A CMS can be hard to learn, or simply too cumbersome for your teams to learn and use. This goes back again to people. There is a commonly held and horribly wrong belief that technology will make things so easy that the need for human involvement goes away. CMSs don’t run themselves, and if the people won’t use it, you’ve got a problem.

For a technological solution (CMS or otherwise) to work it needs to be tailored to the specific content management problems you’re facing. Simply picking and adding a CMS will not usually do it and can end up in lots of wasted time, effort and money. Sorry, folks, it’s more complicated than that.

Some Solutions

So we’ve got a solid, holistic definition of content management and we’ve talked a bit about the problems therein. But what about solutions? Well, I think we’ve already taken the biggest step in reframing the problem, but I’ve got some specific ideas as well.

Get Some People

To manage content properly you have to have people involved. That’s the first step. Put a person (or better, persons) in charge of your content. Give that person the empowerment to make decisions that relate to content.

If nothing else, do this before you do anything with technology. I mean it!

Define Your Content and Establish a Process

Next you need to clarify goals, define roles, and so on. A big part of that is to make sure everyone involved has a clear understanding of the content you’ll be managing. It’s not rocket science and should be fairly easy to pin down, but make sure and eliminate any semantic problems here.

It’s probably a good idea to be specific. For example; determine the that you’re publishing news articles vs. features, etc. Don’t limit yourself to something generic like words vs. photos.

Once you’ve got the people in place and your content defined, you’ll want to establish a solid process. Take some time and set up an editorial calendar and work on learning how the people involved will work together and with the technologies you’ve got in place.

Help Technology Help You

And now we get to the tricky part. The idea here is to discover a technical solution (not a system) that will enable the people to manage the process.

Let’s look at that again. Enable the people to manage the process. So, the “solution” needs to provide tools (publishing and otherwise) to help the people create, publish and maintain content.

There are a lot of canned solutions out there and I could give you a laundry list of this CMS and that CMS, but until you’ve solved the problems above you’d be wasting your time (and likely lots of money) exploring them. The enabling technology could be a CMS or it could extend beyond that, depending on the process and needs of your people.

One of the biggest problems with most CMSs is that they aren’t flexible enough to handle a wide variety of work styles and publishing problems. In many cases, somewhat surprisingly, they’re not tailored enough to the specific content they’re managing. They require hacking and lots of it.

In truth most CMSs end up being custom, regardless of how they start out. From those that bill themselves as one-size fits all to the highly specialized systems which deal with specific industries or types of content. It’s just a matter of how much hacking you’ll need to do to get to what works for your people.

Keeping that in mind, the case could be made for always building a custom solution (not necessarily a CMS) to suit the needs of the particular content, people and processes your working with.

It sounds daunting, but this is where I think the true promise of a technical content management solution lies. With frameworks like Django, CakePHP, Ruby on Rails and the like we can create custom solutions and construct custom systems that are extendable and much more flexible than most of what’s available today.

I don’t want to trivialize the development of these solutions. Building a custom CMS from scratch, for example, would be very difficult. However, it’s important to note the current costs and effort involved with most pre-built CMSs out there. They’re usually really expensive and already requires tons of work to implement in most cases. It’s going to cost you regardless. Doesn’t it make sense to put that money, time and effort into a true custom solution?

I think so. I mean, yes, you’d need specialized resources for development, but it seems as if you need those most times anyway. I know I’d rather offer my clients resources working toward a custom solution than learning yet another proprietary system.

So you could look at a development framework, as opposed to a canned system. That way instead of “hacking” you could “develop.”

Also with a framework, you can extend beyond Web publishing and build specific tools to help the process. An interactive editorial calendar comes to mind, or brainstorming tools. Of course, if you avoid the “one CMS as as a product” mentality, you could probably find lots of smaller, more specific, products that when pulled together are much more enabling than any bloated, proprietary CMS full of features your people will never actually use.

Confused yet?

I promise, the goal of this piece wasn’t to confuse you, and I know that it’s a whole lot to take in.

Here’s the bottom-line: content management can’t be trivialized. And it can’t be perceived as technology first; as a canned product or silver-bullet that’ll eliminate the need for people or processes.

If you’re serious about your content, and you should be, then take the time to do it right. Get the right people in place, clearly define your content, establish a solid process and then work on getting a custom technology solution that brings everything together and truly enables your people and processes.