vitamin

No one told me this was Top 5 List Week. I spotted another useful list in Webland, this time, the five hidden costs of content management systems over at Vitamin.

In a nutshell:

1. The cost of training
2. The cost of quality
3. The cost of functionality
4. The cost of redundancy and flexibility
5. The cost of commitment

In my experience, over the years training costs on modern CMS have dropped, but costs of commitment -- which I will extend to include costs associated with keeping internal customers happy -- keep growing no matter how good, or new, the system.

Those of us with long backgrounds running content-oriented sites may think we can write copy to sell products and services online. Maybe some of us can. But we should begin by reading Shannon Watters' tutorial over at Vitamin: Copywriting for eCommerce.

Key excerpt: