My first website

Somewhere around the beginning of the internet there was a free hosting platform called GeoCities. Eventually bought by Yahoo it enabled anyone to create pages on the internet to share whatever they liked. It was closed in 2009 taking with it over 39 million user generated pages.

This was where I cut my teeth and created my first website on the internet. I must admit it took me some time with their drag and drop interface but I was able to create pages and place text and images on them anywhere with freedom. Needless to say after several painstaking hours of work it ended up a mess of flashing animations, rambling text and unusable links. Boy was I proud of what I had made! I sat back to watch the floods of people wash over my site on the fancy visitor counter I placed at the top of the page.

Imagine my dismay when they never came and that counter never got above double figures. Most of the content was stolen from sites like mine on GeoCities that had got decent visitor numbers so I could not understand why no one was visiting my site.

Along came an acronym

The drag and drop interface used to create my failing website was my first experience with a Content Management System (CMS). A CMS allows people without knowledge of programing languages to publish and manage content on websites easily.

These systems have allowed the internet to become a place where anyone has the freedom to publish content. Blogs like Wordpress and Tumblr have been by far the most popular examples of CMS software with Wordpress clocking up a GeoCities beating 60 million user generated websites since it was released in 2003.

CMS software can also control the visual elements of a website including the theme, layout and structure of pages. This lets editors have the ability to control the content, how it will look and where it appears on the website. This level of control is great for small personal blogs where one person is responsible for both the content and appearance. In the world of the large corporate websites which have been carefully designed and built this freedom can become dangerous.

With great power comes great responsibility

The freedom given by GeoCities CMS software lead to the downfall of my website and lack of visitors. Without any consistency or structure to my pages search engines were unable to categorise my site, reducing the number of visitors finding it. If they did arrive they were presented with unoriginal content, difficult to read pages and bad navigation. All of which lead to my poor visitor figures.

As I became a web developer I spent time learning lessons about what users want. I honed my skills and tools, I worked with talented designers, user interface specialists and copywriters. All of this allowed me to create strong user experiences. Websites that attract visitors with well written content displayed in a structured, consistent and beautiful way.

Giving content editors ultimate control over websites with a CMS without proper limits or training means they could very well be undoing the work of the team that have developed the site. Making changes that are needed but without fully understanding the impact upon the user experiences.

Who controls the future

User experiences on the internet are changing. Content delivery is becoming tailored to the individual. Apple Siri and Google Now are great examples of how content can become more useful by knowing information about the user. Product recommendation systems developed by Amazon and others are using computer learning with large customer data sets to pick out the perfect next purchase for visitors.

The content in these new experiences is still being created through a CMS but the control of who sees it is not in the hands of an editor but a computer. When the editor controls what is seen they only have a view of what content is to offer. In the new computerised model the computer also has a view about who is seeing this content and can pick the content accordingly.

Large sets of customer information is already being collected through analytics and sign up forms on websites. This data could be used to improve user journeys or customise the content delivered to specific users, all in the aim to improve the customer experience. These improvements will be constant, incremental, and data driven all happening without need for an editor.

A little control goes a long way

Content editors will always need the ability to update content without needing developers on hand. They should be able to choose from themes, layouts and page structures to display the content to the users in the best way. As they are choosing and not defining the way the content looks the consistency and user experience of the site will still remain how the website creators originally intended.

Soon editors will only be creating the content leaving CMS software and computer learning to deliver the most relevant content to individuals browsing the site. Releasing control over content placement will allow better more personalised user experiences with easier ways to optimise and improve websites using actual real time user information and behaviours.