Content Management System Example - Team Vodafone Website
I was around the corner at Sandown for the Just Car Insurance 500 round of the V8 Supercars series in September, connecting with my petrol-head roots. It was an great race and Team Vodafone brought Craig Lowndes home for the win.
Today, I went and checked out the Team Vodafone website and I noticed that they are using the Platform Interactive Content Management System. For a site like this that will be regularly updated, has lots of different content and requires eCommerce, it would seem a logical way to go.
What I saw on the site however was pretty disappointing, and I think it’s an example of what can happen when a content management system is sold as a website solution. You see, the website sales process often goes like this:
Client: I need a website and I want to be able to edit it myself.
Sales Rep: We’ve got a content management system that’s perfect for you!
Sales Rep: Look it has these great features… forums, web polls, email marketing, blogs…Â
Sales Rep: We’ll do a web design, put together a template and we’ll load it into our content management system. Bang, there’s your website…
All sounds good but there’s one critical thing missing. Did you spot it?
The sales rep is so concerned with selling a content management system that he forgot mention one important question.
It’s a question that the client didn’t even know that they should ask!
Who’s going to create the content?
Most website companies just aren’t good at creating content. The trouble is that then neither are most clients. All too often the website company quietly avoids the question that nobody asked.
Companies often underestimated the magnitude of creating good content.
The problems with this site were too numerous to go through here, but I’ve mentioned just a few to highlight the traps of underestimating the importance of content.
URLs
The first thing I noticed was the URL’s throughout the Team Vodafone sites. Not only are they not search engine friendly, they’re not human friendly either.
That will be a real drawback for getting this site listed in Google. It also makes it hard to remember where you are, and where you’ve been in the site.
There are content management systems that don’t suffer from this problem, but it is fairly typical.
Photos
On the team’s merchandise sales eCommerce website, I noticed that many photos were not displayed. It’s not that there wasn’t a photo to use, because there are photos of the products on the category pages.
If this product page was put together by a good web developer, or at least someone experienced at the job of running a website, they would have:
- Found a picture to use
- Proofed the page
- Made it look right.
This problem will have a direct impact on merchandise sales and conversion rates.
http://store2.teamvodafone.com/shop.php?mode=item&i=140
In the pages of the main Team Vodafone website, there were many broken images such as this example. Now mistakes happen and one or two broken images in a site is not the end of the world. But when there’s as many as there is in this website, it’s just unprofessional.
http://www2.teamvodafone.com/index.php?id=39
Hyperlinks
I browsed over to the page that lists all of the members of the team. You’ll notice that many people come together to run a winning race team. It’s quite a substantial organisation.Â
You’ll notice that you can click on the names of the team members, and I thought we’d be able to read some more about them. But clicking on the links took me to all sorts of unexpected places.
Clicking on a few of the links from this page actually took me to the Content Management System’s login page!
http://www2.teamvodafone.com/index.php?id=37
Summary
Here is a company that is really good at making race cars that win, but apparently they’re not so good at running websites. Why would it be their priority?
If you’re thinking about a content management system for your website. Think first about the content.
Maintaining website content in HTML is not rocket science, but it’s also not for technophobes. If you don’t have someone in house that is an expert at maintaining a good website, then a content management system might not be right for you.
UPDATE: Since posting this article, most of the issues mentioned here appear to have been fixed. Whilst that’s good, it’s now the end of the V8 supercar season.  These problems appeared on the live website around the time of some big wins for the team. It would have been a crucial high traffic time for the website, and the presentation was unprofessional.
From the author: As a web programmer I have been involved in developing several content management systems. I was hands on in developing our own content management suite called eComMetrix®.
