A little less technical, but an extremely important part of a good CMS system is to always develop (or select a turn-key solution) with your users in mind. That customer might be your organization, or maybe you’re building a project for a client.

It happens all the time. You spend so much time developing the application that every little intimate detail is familiar to you. But what’s easy to forget is that to someone who’s never seen your work yet, it’s not so intuitive. When developing front-end applications like websites, much care and dedication is given to architecting information and creating a self-describing, intuitive user interface. Simplicity tends to win out, and the goal of any website is to be easy to use. Why should the content management system be any different?

Although the audience is (ideally) smaller than the front-end audience, the same level of architecting and information design should be given to the CMS system. I’ve moved on, but one of the places I worked never dedicated any resource or time to developing an easy-to-use, easy-to-implement CMS solution. The result was a poor product, branded with our logo, which cost us more than a handful of hours of free training and support calls. Not to mention that without  a standard, fixing errors or making upgrades always took longer than necessary, because the CMS was never the same from one client to the next.

Give the CMS project the same diligence you gave to the front end and design. Use an information architect and a designer if necessary. Dedicating the time and resources necessary to make a easy-to-use, easy-to-implement CMS solution for your client will save you money and aggrevation in the short and long terms.