The Web Project Guide: Determine System Requirements | Select a Content Management System

Deane is in full gear cranking out these technical chapters, and I’m enjoying my second run-through of Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

In all seriousness, though.

More and more, my role in strategic content planning has moved from understanding communication and organization to helping select the tools and features that will make that communication and organization work. That’s the start, really: the stuff we’ve written about in the first 14 chapters all leads to this. If you’re talking about requirements, that means — hopefully — you’ve done a good chunk of work figuring out what those requirements are.

You’ve planned your vacation, and now you get to start picking out restaurants and dive bars.

This can be daunting. We know — we see it every day, helping clients get to a point where they can identify what their site needs, and the CMS that might provide those features and solve those problems. “How do we select a CMS?” “How do we better plan for development?” “How do we understand the THINGS we need to plug into this … giant tool we’re thinking about purchasing?” Questions like that.

So if you are in this position — and we find that all directors of marketing or digital strategists or IT leads find themselves in this position at one point or another when it comes to building a new website — Deane’s new chapters will hopefully help you a lot:

CHAPTER 15: Determine System Requirements
At this stage, you have enough information to draw up requirements for what you need in a content management system (CMS).

CHAPTER 16: Select a Content Management System
Selecting a CMS is a combination of research and vendor engagement. You need to identify prospective systems, investigate their capabilities, engage with the vendors for demonstrations or questions, and finally distill and synthesize all that information and come to a decision.

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