Content Management Systems and Solutions

A content management system (CMS) is a web publishing tool that enables you to easily update your website, intranet or extranet.

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Web publishing made easy

In the ‘old’ days of the web, you could only update your own site if you had patience, time and training in idiosyncratic products like Dreamweaver. Larger organisations tended to bear the cost of outsourcing web publishing and editing work to external suppliers.

Fortunately, content management is now all about ease, speed and DIY.

Each system is different but all have adaptable features that let you control your own publishing process. A traditional publishing workflow may see a writer, editor and manager involved in a publication before it’s signed off. The same quality control can be built into your CMS, to tie in with existing ways of working.

Shift has tried and tested a vast number of CMS solutions. We don’t endorse a particular product and continue to explore emerging technology. We identify the CMS that will work best for each client, based on their business needs.

Flexibility within structure

Purpose-built templates for image, text, audio or video protect the integrity of the design. But content management systems are sometimes accused of restricting design freedom by providing a narrow range of templates, or layouts for each page.

Shift’s unique approach to content management introduces unparalleled options for the ways standard CMS platforms can deliver content. They allow you to set up pages in various ways, depending on your audience and objectives.

Content management solutions can also be equipped to repurpose content; an image or piece of text can appear in different places throughout the site. Update one and you refresh them all.

Different types of CMS

‘Out of the box’ CMS solutions can be perfectly adequate for small sites, but more complex scenarios often require a custom-built approach. Standard products may need adapting for your technical environment or to perform tasks unique to your business.

Shift’s in-house technical team works with industry-leading technical partners to create unique solutions. We frequently work on websites involving thousands of content items that need to be stored and organised for secure and easy editing.

Digital asset management

As the amount of website content continues to grow, digital asset management is fast becoming a key element of web development and management.

Asset management systems sort and order all of your digital images, documents, video and multimedia and give them somewhere to ‘live’. Shift systems enable you to keep track of digital data, control its use and convert files to other media formats.

An example of digital asset management is media catalogues, or file libraries. Low resolution images or compressed video items are stored in a database. Once you’ve found the image you’re after, you can choose how you want to present it online: as a thumbnail, large image, small image; in low bandwidth video or multiple video formats.

Asset repositories are a more complex example: heavy-weight databases that store actual items, along with metadata to describe them. You can control who has access to the database and how they use it.

Technical partners

Shift’s software and technology partners include industry-leaders 3months, Solnet, Optimation and Oxygen to name just a few.