• plugging in relevant advertising efforts into most popular content areas.
• creating new content for tags that are popular to get more authority on a subject.
• diverting traffic to other interest areas of the website.
• optimizing content from user statistical data through a user experience learning curve.
• finding and evaluating my niche audience.
• keeping content up to date.
• producing spider bait for search engine bots.

You may argue that I may get those statistics via an analytics tool, I agree, but analytics tools show you most popular pages, events, trends, visitor history and search queries of external sources. What you get with a search cloud is an overview of most popular “internal” searches conducted on your site according to word frequency. You could however use your code wizardry to build reports from saved search queries.

Apart from the data that a search cloud provides you, you should also consider what value it offers to your audience.  Here are a few advantages:

• a bird’s eye view of what’s hot and happening on your site.
• a fast and readily available method of searching through your content.
• a first point of reference to your loyal visitors.
• maximizing user experience and performance of your site.

There is another flavour of the cloud offering and its called the tag cloud. The difference is simple. Search clouds comprise of search queries weighted by the size of a font that are generated dynamically through user activity on your site. Tag clouds, on the other hand are the most referenced words in your metadata within your content that you define yourself. I prefer search clouds as you are not enforcing your opinions on your audience rather putting the audience’s needs and wants first and foremost and creating a self generated user centric tool on your site. A shortfall of search clouds is that you need data acquired via user activity before you can build one. If your website is relatively new, you may find that tag clouds work better for you as you can probably ascertain by looking at my own tag cloud on the right hand navigation pane.

Examples of search and tag clouds

One of the most famous clouds is from the Web 2.0 school of thought.

Web 2.0 Tag Cloud

A US based company came up with a novel idea of creating a cloud search engine. You define your queries and give them importance by weighting them and then running a search. Give it a go at SearchCloud.net

Search Cloud Search Engine

The everyday phenonmenon at del.icio.us

del.icio.us Tag Cloud

How to develop a search cloud

Clouds come in different shapes, sizes and frequencies. They work differently for each type of site or industry. The functional workings of a cloud are usually the brainchild of the webmaster or technical architect of the website. You can define what your search cloud does for you and your business. I would recommend some research and development to come up with a solid technical specification. Some best practices on design and aesthetics of search clouds should also be considered before you develop a custom-built search cloud. Help is available all over the web. There are numerous open source applications that will help you create a search cloud for your website for free too.

Customize your CMS application to build your cloud

An idea I came up with when I was the technical architect for a client’s website was to build a few scripts around the search cloud. Configuring your website/CMS to store all data of your visitors keyword search activities is the first obvious step. Separately, you can build a keyword bank in your database to act as an automatic moderation tool for your search cloud to flush out non-relevant keywords.  In practice the script would screen any words against your keyword bank to find matches. Once a match is found, the keyword is allowed to be automatically published in your cloud. The frequency of exact matches would determine the size / weight of the font.

Use analytics tool to build your cloud

Why not go a step further while you are at it. Why not combine most popular keywords coming from external search engines to your search clouds to give them more weighting. This may easily work for you or against you, so be careful. I will let you be the judge of that.  Almost all analytics tools give you reports on what keywords your users used to find your website. This data can be collected from either your analytics application’s front end, an exported report or even its database. You can configure your website to talk to your analytics tool’s database to pull that data in at timed intervals for auto publish activities. You may however not have database access to any third party hosted analytics tools like Google Analytics, but you may get your hands on this juicy data from licensed applications such as WebTrends, Omniture and Speedtrap.

Search clouds are here to stay

More and more people are warming up to search clouds nowadays. It is becoming a buzzword and the first thing people associate to Web 2.0. Perhaps you will see search clouds making their way into usability guidelines and best practices for websites.

My research has concluded that you will find hundreds of websites talking about tag clouds, but only a handful explaining search clouds. Just my two pennies worth.

Please feel free to leave a comment with links to your search clouds.

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The first thing you need to think about is getting a wish list together. My list spawned through R&D and experience with bespoke CMS builds I conceived. By all means, please do your own research and come up with your own list, although this one is not a bad one to start with.

Web CMS features wish list

• Content access rights
• Content approval
• Content templates
• Technical transparency
• Content ownership
• Content accessibility
• Content creation
• Content management
• Content publishing
• Content scheduling
• Time sensitive opportunities
• Logs of user access
• Audit trials
• Version control
• Presentation consistency
• Brand integrity
• Workflow processes
• Web standards management (accessibility)
• Auto site map generation
• XML sitemap generation
• Newsletters
• Calendar of events
• Rich text editor with HTML support
• Spell checker link checker
• SEO compliant
• Scalability
• Adaptability
• XML integration
• XSL transformations
• Cascading Stylesheets
• Microsoft word integration and content cleanup
• Media library with ”alt” text options
• Form creation
• Search and advanced search
• Site map generation
• User reporting
• User management
• Access rights
• Multi server publishing
• Multiple publishing formats
• Dashboard
• Wizard based content management
• Affiliate marketing management
• Advertising management
• Ad hoc modifications
• Banner management
• Blogs
• Public forums
• Drag n Drop content
• Image resizing
• Undo
• UI levels
• Standard contend and keywords bank
• Content syndication (RSS)
• URL rewriting
• Polls
• Surveys
• Sandbox
• Multiple level user membership areas

Build considerations

• Ease of deployment
• Minimal training
• Managing multiple websites from a single licence
• Documented information architecture
• Template creation
• Content migration tools
• Developer forums

OK, my wish list was massive. Your requirements may be similar, less or even more. A lot of CMS platforms have all of the above functionality out of the box.  Others may need plugins or custom builds. As you can probably ascertain, I was looking for an enterprise CMS solution. These tend to be the most expensive types of CMS.

Costs

If like me, you were looking for an enterprise CMS, a very important consideration is your license cost. An evaluation of the following items should be considered necessary:

• Multiple hosting servers (authoring, publishing, backup, database, additional web farms)
• Should cover multiple websites on the same host including sub domains / microsites
• Should cover unlimited number of articles or web pages published
• Should cover multiple processors on the hosting machines.
• Should cover multiple database connections.
• Should cover a sufficient amount of editors for the CMS
• Should include multiple installations of the software.

I cannot emphasize enough on the need for putting time and effort into researching and identifying the right CMS for your needs. Your chosen CMS will eventually become an important part of your business operations. You need to make a good choice. I use the word “good” in the context that not every decision is the best one. Business needs change constantly, hence the need for better more robust tools in a constantly changing environment.

Doing the research

OK, enough of the theatrics. Let’s get down to how you will find the information you need. You will find in your research that search engines will render results for both closed source and open source CMS almost equally. My perception is that the big players in the web world have established authority via closed source platform applications, hence glorifying closed source software suppliers. Open source solutions are also in abundance, partly because everyone and anyone can easily get their hands on them but mostly because they are free. In Web 2.0 context, this is known as the long tail.

A good resource in my opinion to get an overview of the products on the market is cmswatch.com and more specifically their vendor list. They do ask you to pay a whopping $975 for one of their reports that gives you a low down on all of the 42 Web CMS providers they cover, but I reckon, with a combination of common sense and Google, you should be able to find answers to all your questions.

Another resource is cmswire.com. It is more of a blog than anything but the content is up the date and right on the money most of the time. You may however find it tiresome to go over all their posts to find answers to your specific queries (if you have any).

If all else fails and you are still in a dilemma about which CMS is right for your business, float an RFP (request for proposal) document to your shortlist of suppliers. Let them do the hard work to try to win your business, you call the shots. I came across a good presentation on building an RFP that you may find useful. There is another tedious excersize of evaluating all the proposals you recieve by doing an evaluation matrix. A good overview of how to contruct your evaluation matrix can be found at positive-way.com.

I’d like to take this opportunity to list down a few of my favourite content management systems:

Established market players:

• Sitecore
• Ektron
• Fatwire
• Immediacy

Open source players:

• Wordpress
• PHP Nuke
• Dot Net Nuke
• Joomla
• Drupal

In conclusion

I would be foolish to assume that my readers are from small, mediocre or large organizations with similar requirements for their CMS. In reality, every business has its unique requirements for its web strategy, which inadvertently does impact decisions. You will find in certain circumstances that even a free CMS fulfils all your needs. This very blog is created on Wordpress which is an open source blogging application that a lot of people have customized to work as a fully fledged Web CMS.  You can be certain that all the hard work and time you put into indentifying a CMS that ticks all the boxes will be a worthwhile investment.

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