While working on a new section for the website I’m in charge of, it occurred to me that this task could be compared to filing paper documents, and should be achieved in five steps.

Gathering documents

This first step is about gathering all information you want to publish in the new section. It includes making sure all information you get belongs to the same set of boxes. You also have to make sure each piece of content appears only once. Find a native location for each of them, reuse will be dealt with later (but you can already take notes of what will be reused). It is also the right time to exclude information already showing in any other section of the website. You want to gather only core documentation for the topic you’re interested in.

Opening boxes

Content now needs to be organised into sub-topics. Think of them as if they were the boxes to which you break down documentation. Content generally can be broken down using these useful questions: what, who, how, when, where. Depending on the amount of content, you will end up with one or more pages for each “box”. The challenge is to have not too much and not too few boxes.

Writing the labels

Deciding on what each sub part should be named may seem a not so important matter. Indeed it is one of the most crucial decisions you have to make when setting up your new section. Because such a label should be meaningful for all users and should reflect the efficient information organisation you came up with in the previous phase. If you can’t find a harmonious and efficient set of labels to put on your boxes, it may mean you have to reconsider your set of boxes or repartition among them.

Filling boxes

It is now time to proceed to actual filing: put each document in a box. A document should go in one box and only one. You will deal with reuse and links later on. If you find one box is over packed compared to others, you may have to review your boxes or labels to reach a good balance. Once you’re done, have a look at your filled and labelled boxes. Do you reckon it is easy to find where any topic belongs? Ask a friend to do the same exercise, and make any adjustment they would suggest.

Finalising organisation

You now have a well balanced set of information. At that stage you will want to optimise your content inserting links between pages and displaying some information in more than one place. It is now time to tag, highlight and comment content properly to use your CMS re use facilities in full.

Remember that what you’re looking to achieve is a meaningful, complete and well balanced section that allows users to find what they are looking for. That’s why I recommend this 5 steps approach: gathering, breaking down, labelling, filing, linking.

I have spent the last year and a half observing content management system users struggling with a not exactly cutting edge system. I found out their errors would always happen for the same 4 reasons. Though it may seem cruel to observe people as if they were just lab animals, so I also want to add I offered them the best support ever during that time. One last thing: no user has been injured during this experiment.

Typing path

Whenever contributors have to type in image or page URL to insert them in their text, there are 1 chance out of 4 they make a mistake. This can raise up to 3 out of 4 if they have to type in a different domain name than the one hosting application they are currently logged in. Paths and URLs should not be of users business, it is enough they have to type external site URL when linking to them. Images and internal links should always be inserted using a visual browsing facility.

Default content

Default content is great because it is a way to ensure no page goes live with empty content elements. But sometimes I wonder what is worse: no content or irrelevant content? Let’s face it: average users can’t be asked to remember to check every default content field to see if it needs to be adapted. They often contribute to website as part of their jobs, because they are expert of a given field and so are not specialised in web content. The solution is to explicitly extend their contribution to hidden content such as META or alt attribute, and to make it mandatory on a system point of view. And also to make the system take care as much as possible of things such as pages title or navigation links.

Externally formatted text

Users love pasting text they have previously edited in their favorite word processor. This is probably because lots of WYSIWYG editors featured in CMS are not that user friendly. But this is a nightmare because it imports all sorts of formatting bits that CMS can deal with more or less easily. If there is no easy way to integrate word processor in the CMS interface (or just because it is not a good idea), make sure this kind of error can be handled correctly by the system. It should always block saving or warn user when an unacceptable piece of content has been inserted. Another good work around is to feature a ‘clean formatted text’ button: it transforms any formatted text to pure text. It is almost magic, so make sure you let users know about this.

Hacks

The most important is not what a system can do but what it has been designed to do. Whenever users have the technical possibility to hack what the CMS is supposed to let them do, there is a potential error on its way. A good rule of thumb is that there is danger if code can be inserted (and interpreted as is by the system) on a visual interface. Access to code view in WYSIWYG editor should always be restricted to really expert users. And wild formatting using weapons such as b or u in pure text fields should not be accepted.

Conclusion

To sum-up, first steps to user friendliness of a CMS interface are:

• Browsing computer files and system facility whenever a path to a resource is needed
• Educating users about necessity of good hidden content
• Making the CMS handling site structure and navigation automatically
• Offering a ‘clean formatted text’ facility
• Restricting access to source code
• Forbidding html tags anywhere outside of the code view facility

To end on a positive note, I found out that observing how errors happen gave me a better understanding of what a CMS basic features should be.