We often work with clients on their internal systems and in all the time of doing that, I’ve yet to see a content management system which allowed business content creators and editors to work without any IT involvement and create sites that were:

• consistent with the rest of the user experience (other than by being bad)
• accessible

It seems that over time an HTML editor role has crept in and now it is not just accepted but expected. In the worse cases when the business content editor wants to make a change they have to create change requests which go through a development change process with all the extra time and cost bloat that that includes – madness!

I think it happens for a number of reasons:

• a low skill level of the developer when creating the system HTML templates
• limited flexibility in those templates, meaning that the HTML content editor layers lots of complex HTML to achieve their goals
• horrible WYSIWYG editors that allow content editors to create inaccessible pages
• no training/support for business content editors so they don’t know what makes a readable, usable, accessible page

Poor HTML skills and missing requirements about template types are simple to fix and no one should be in that position.

The content editor is more difficult though. The temptation is to buy an off the shelf editor thinking it will be easier for the business to use and therefore it’s job done. The reality is that it’s quickly out of the hands of the business because sooner of later there needs some custom HTML to do something that the templates don’t support. The markup they create often has accessibility issues too – “features” in the editor which create output fixed font sizes, headings out of order, poorly embedded flash etc. The .Net controls seem to be the main offenders. My feeling there is that wiki markup for content areas within templates is still a good solution and quite simple to follow provided there is a guide available right there in the editor page.

I’ll post some wireframes shortly to illustrate what I feel makes a simple yet effective CMS back-end.