Hovering Over The Back Button | On Shanty Towns, Bulldozers, Cats and Website Consolidation….
This blog post is inspired by an excellent conversation I had with my colleagueScott Liewehr a few days ago, about the challenges of managing multiple sites – that ended with the comment “that sounds like a great blog post”. So here we are, while the inspiration is still warm – allow me to wheel out an old hobby horse of mine and give it a couple of laps of the yard – not sure I can claimgreat blog post but.. here goes…
This particular hobby horse (I have a few) is the one that goes by the name “large organizations and a strategy of website consolidation” – something I think is driven by a confusion between ‘platform’ and ‘website’.
I’m surprised folks still think like this – I saw this thinking in a keynote presentation at an industry event last year. The presenter represented a very large organization with content in a couple of languages, serving a diverse demographic audience with a broad suite of services and information. In fact it was the broadest of demographics as it was the government of a US state.
I’m simplifying slightly but I kid you not – the key success metric for their content management strategy was a decreasing number of websites – a beaming proud presenter showed us a sliding graph and concluded, triumphantly – ‘yes folks and I’ll have this down to one in a year’.
Hmm…. I really don’t subscribe to this, in the case of websites, less is definitely, definitely, definitely not always more. What business benefit does having one website bring over, say two.. or three? Why would a single site be the final state of enlightenment, achieved after years of CMS contemplation and implementation?
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