Commerce and Content – Still not fully integrated

The two disciplines of digital content management and eCommerce have been side-by-side for many years now, but why has the enterprise software / service market not yet managed to create a bunch of mature products that have both great content management systems (CMS’s) and great digital retailing service… and that are actually fully integrated into each other?

I believe the root of this problem lies in the origins and on-going management of these two inter-connected digital disciplines. Back in the dim and distant days you had two distinct silos for managing online: the digital marketing team who managed the content (text, images and increasingly rich assets such as video) and the eBusiness or eCommerce team who managed the product catalogue & payment side of things. In my opinion this has historically resulted in two different sets of people creating disparate experiences and leaving one crucially important person floundering in between… the customer.

The only thing is, the customers these days do actually notice when an online experience clashes. They quickly give up when they are struggling with a user interface that doesn't help them search, find and browse through the products they want. They try your competitor’s URL when your site doesn't connect product content with the ability to buy it in one simple action.

I therefore think the major vendors of Web Content Management (WCM) and eCommerce need to seriously take a look at their product stack. They then need to integrate & align these two areas into one compelling proposition. This shouldn't be done in half measures (E.g. by a large CMS vendor just buying up a small eCommerce product and offering it as a complex bolt-on  to their already weighty offering), in most cases this will need a complete re-think of both sides of the equation to create something that works for the customer (and the end user).

Until then, both in-house teams and the customer will continue to have a mixed experience. And quite frankly in this more mature digital age…. That’s bloody awful!

Yes, but do you build websites?

On a call with a business prospect a few weeks back, I began to get the feeling they really didn't understand either what they wanted or what myself & my team could offer.

Why? Well here's a rough precis of the conversation I had:

Them: "So why should we hire you?"
Me: "We are a team of digital consultants and delivery experts, who have a wealth of online experience across the creative, user experience, commercial, marketing and technology disciplines".
Them: "So tell me about your recent experience with Internet technology"
Me: "Oh, that's a pretty big topic and I don't know what technology we are talking about yet, so I'll talk conceptually"
Them: "So you don't understand about Internet technologies then?" [some scribbling].
Me: "Yes of course we do... however I don't know the details of your systems so cannot dig into the detail. Would you like me to give you an overview of our systems experience?"
Them: "Oh, I thought you understood about these things" [rapid scribbling]
Me: "Yes... Err, we do. Do you have a specific piece of work in mind?"
Them: "We need to improve our customer journey"
Me: "Great, we can review your key personas and user flows, then identify the major drop-off points to optimise your goals"
Them: "So can you tell me how you would improve our customer journey?"
Me: "Oh, as I said... we'd look at your conversions, acquisition paths, hopefully review your analytics and suggest quick wins as well as longer-term improvements" [a small scribble]
Them: "We've been told that we need to improve the customer journey and that we need a content management system. What you've told me doesn't sound like a Content Management System"
Me: "Err... No, what I've explained is our process to deliver site improvements. We can also deliver a CMS for you, design and develop a multi-channel interactive platform and ensure it is delivered then marketed in the right way to meet your KPI's"
Them: "Yes, but do you build websites?

rebuilding the new Ideal Interface website

The old Ideal Interface company website had been up for about 3 years and was looking  a little dated. Not only was it out of date from a content perspective (as well as having our old London address & details, it contained references to an association with a parent company that has now folded) . On top of this, the CMS we had used required upgrading and given that the site was only a small, I thought a blogging platform was more suitable. Oh.... it also wasn't mobile compatible, which I see as a must in the current online world.

I therefore made the decision last week to redevelop the site, but this time using the Wordpress blogging platform.... The site's main purpose is to house a small amount of content based around our central proposition of eCommerce and Digital Marketing consulting, so I thought a blog was the ideal vehicle going forward. But here was the challenge I set myself...... get it done for no charge (except my time).

The first issue I had was exporting the content from our current content management system (Drupal) to our new one. Despite looking at several ways to do this automatically, I eventually settled for a 'copy and paste' approach. This actually turned out to be quite time efficient, given that Wordpress accepted most of the formatting from the old CMS.

The second one was migrating the domain across. You see the forwarding of our company email addresses is managed via one domain name provider, but migrating the DNS across meant losing this forwarding (which was not available in Wordpress as far as I could see).
Note: I only found out about the lack of forwarding by stopping the company email addresses for a period of a few hours. Luckily these were saved by our DNS ISP and eventually came through. Ooops!
The remedy to this issue was to give the website a subdomain and eventually I settled on http://blog.idealinterface.co.uk
However, Wordpress did charge me for the mapping of this subdomain, at a cost of about £9.

So now, we have a new site. One that has the same content, is updated using the Wordpress app on my iPhone and works incredibly well on mobile devices. I'm not 100% sure I like the template used on the PC version and I need to include the logo in there ASAP. But for just a very small outlay I can upgrade this template to a premium one or get one developed that I like.

Let's see how it fares.... especially as the domain has now changed and this may affect our SEO rankings.

Putting a new site live

We've just put our new company website together (www.idealinterface.co.uk) and its been fun to get back to what we do best... building sites that do what they should.

A bit thanks to the following people for their hard work (in no particular order):

• Sarah (design)
• Tony (site and CMS development, hosting, last minute changes, putting up with my late night phone calls, etc.)
• Marc (Information Architecture and copy writing)
• Ben (design, asset production, content changes, learning Kentico from scratch, etc.)
• Tim (feedback)

and if I've missed anyone, then thanks to you to!

Ways to make content more portable

Distributing your media across the web can be a beneficial way of providing your users and extended target audience with the assets that you want to provide them with (more examples of use and mis-use here)

The immediate and instant delivery of your content and media to numerous people across the web is not the stuff of the future or something so cutting edge that it requries a bespoke multi-million pound Media Distribution System.... it can be achieved easily over time, as part of your corporate site's evolution and just used combinations of several known & standard technologies & practices already out there.

So... what are they?

Content/Media Management System:
Including:categorisation (tagging & meta info), reformatting, versioning, workflow, etc. to manage the content you want to 'push'

Admin function:
This manages the permissions / rights / subscription / personalisation process

Syndication:
RSS is by far the most preferred method of distribution and updating content. Other methods of syndication can be used but RSS is now becoming a common standard for pulling content thanks to podcasts and widget technology gaining widespread usage.

Widgets :
These can be used and are just self-contained HTML components that deliver text and media. There are several standards for these and also some bespoke work may be required to fit it into some frameworks / templates. However, sometimes just the media is sent or referring URL is called.

Hosting:
It is also important that this service has an adaptive hosting facility that that can react to large fluctuations in demand across a potential global footprint, especially if streaming of audio or video is required.