A CMS Your Team Will Actually Use

The failure is behavioural, not technical

Most abandoned content management systems work perfectly. The problem is that the person who has to publish is afraid of breaking the page, so they email the change to the agency instead, and eventually stop asking.

Six months later nothing has been published since launch, and the assumption is that the CMS was wrong. It was not; the editing experience was.

Structured fields, not a blank canvas

The strongest single design decision is to give editors labelled fields rather than a free-form page builder: heading, intro, three benefits, call to action. It is impossible to break the layout, obvious what to write, and the page stays on-brand automatically.

Page builders offer more freedom and are the main cause of sites that drift into a mess by month nine. The freedom is used once, by a confident person, and then feared by everyone else.

An editor who can only produce a correct page will publish weekly. An editor who could produce anything, including something broken, will publish never.

What makes editors confident

• A preview that genuinely matches the live page
• Undo, or revision history with a one-click restore
• Validation that explains — “headings work best under 60 characters”
• Automatic image resizing, so nobody has to think about dimensions
• A draft state, so an unfinished page is never one click from public

Modelling content properly

Content should be modelled as data, not as pages. A case study is a thing with a client, a sector, a challenge, an outcome and a set of images — not a document someone laid out by hand.

1. The same content can appear in a listing, a related block and a feed without being rewritten
2. Filtering and search become possible without a rebuild
3. A design change updates every instance at once
4. Editors fill fields rather than fighting a layout

This takes a couple of extra days at the start and repays them within the first year, every time.

WordPress, headless, or something else

For most businesses WordPress with properly structured custom fields is the right answer, and the failures attributed to it are usually failures of configuration.

The two-page guide

Every CMS we hand over comes with a two-page guide covering the five things the team will actually do: edit a page, add a post, change an image, add a team member, publish. Not a manual — a page.

We also record a ten-minute video walkthrough, because the person who joins in six months will not read the guide but will watch the video.

Frequently asked questions