Why the CMS user experience matters as much as the website experience
QA Manager, Alex, shares his tips for creating an optimal CMS user experience.
Why is the CMS experience important?
When organisations invest in a new website, the focus is usually placed on the front-end user experience.
You just need to look at the number of blog posts out across the web that talk about creating website experiences, but very few, by comparison speak about the CMS experience itself, and you cannot have one without the other.
The experience for the people managing the website through the CMS is just as important. A poorly designed content management system can slow teams down, create frustration, and reduce the effectiveness of the website itself.
Explanatory text within the CMS
What may be obvious to the developer building the website via the CMS, will not always be obvious to the person that will be interacting with it, so our developers are now able to add explanatory text to sections for ease-of-use and to improve understanding and productivity for the customer using the websites. This is a simple implementation and reaps instant rewards with very little effort.
Tips for a consistent CMS:
• Provide guidelines on whether an image component should be landscape or portrait to get the most out of a component, eliminating the need to re-edit.
• Direction on the ordering of components to eliminate space on the webpage, avoid clutter.
• Specifying the alignment of a component (right/centre/middle), which allows the user to decide if it is the correct component for the section they are editing.
• Tagging shared content with advice on the areas of the CMS the shared content can be used within.
• Explanations on the outcome when using a page ‘theme’ (i.e. dark or light).
All of the above are simple guidelines that will save the CMS user a lot of time, by eliminating the need to create the site and make several rounds of amends to get the desired content and a satisfactory outcome.
The small UX improvements that make a big difference
A lot of the features that we create to make the CMS a more user-friendly environment, do not come from any guidelines or requirements but instead are put down to pure common-sense.
When we realise and see the benefits of specific implementations on one client piece of work, we then see the value that can be gained by using these learnings across all our clients.
This generates an ongoing list of improvements and optimisations, ultimately building a best-in-class CMS user experience.
Small tweaks that make a big difference:
Put things alphabetically in lists – this may not sound important, but from personal experience, if you are trying to add a component or select a feature to include on a page, it becomes far easier when the options are listed alphabetically. Small usability improvements like this can save time and reduce frustration when working within the CMS daily.
Error log structure – it is very easy, and often seems intuitive, to dump all informational logs into a generic error log table. However, this can make genuinely important issues much harder to identify. A clean and well-structured error log system makes it significantly easier to quickly locate, understand, and resolve issues without having to filter through large amounts of irrelevant information.
Is your CMS using the correct time format and time zone? Dates are used throughout a CMS for publishing schedules, article dates, and time-sensitive content, so it is important that they are displayed in the correct regional format for the customer using the platform. Some CMS platforms default to US formatting and, as mentioned earlier in this article, these inconveniences are often simply accepted rather than addressed.
Break content-heavy pages into flexible components – if a page contains a large amount of content, consider structuring it into reusable and flexible components rather than placing everything into one large section. Much like building blocks, this approach makes it easier to add, move, edit, or remove content over time, helping the page remain organised, manageable, and effective.
Final thoughts..
At true, we believe a website is only as effective as the CMS behind it. By prioritising CMS usability, accessibility, and editor experience from the start, we help clients manage their content more efficiently and get more value from their websites.
Looking to improve your CMS experience? Get in touch with the team at true.
