Re: CMS Site Structures

>The problem is, that while I get general warnings on the failure of CMS
>products I am not actually getting any 'specific' reasons why as to not use
>their product.
>  
>

Hi Jason,

Here are some issues I would consider (yep, I also represent  a CMS 
vendor - I work for liveSTORYBOARD CMS - http://www.livestoryboard.com):

- Any time spent learning a proprietary templating system is wasted 
time. Why not invest your efforts/$$ in a standard technology and avoid 
being dependent on a single vendor? We have chosen XSLT for 
liveSTORYBOARD CMS, so if a client decides to leave our CMS (though we 
haven't had such a case), they would get their content in XML, their 
XSLT templates, their generated HTML/XHTML/RSS/ATOM/etc. and easily be 
able to port it all to another standards-based solution.

- Does Marqui keep content separate from presentation? In what format? 
Their own site's code leaves a lot to be desired  
(http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.marqui.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=%28detect+automatically%29), 
so I would assume they separate page elements in includes and the body 
of content is kept in one chunk of tag soup... One of the primary 
benefits of a content management system is to be able to reuse content.  
If you wanted to have some content on multiple pages would you have to 
maintain it in multiple places? Could it be styled one way in one page, 
and another way on another page? If you wanted to redesign your site, 
could you do so just by modifying CSS? You mentioned that you have 
multiple sites, sometimes with inconsistent styles - wouldn't you want 
to fix that in the migration to a CMS? More importantly, wouldn't you 
want the CMS to prevent that from happening in the future?

- Is it possibly to markup content semantically? User agents, such as 
search engines are becoming increasingly smarter about semantics, and 
who doesn't want to keep search engines happy :)

My advice would be to make a list of what you want to get out of a CMS 
and start isolating vendors that way (we provide some suggestions here: 
http://www.livestoryboard.com/CMS-Resources/How-to-choose-a-web-CMS.html )

best,
Iva

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