Content Management Matters ™

When Tony Byrne, founder of CMS Watch speaks, people listen. Education Web professionals, especially.

At Monday's Education Web Professional National Conference, a packed house of web professionals serving public, private and independent schools in the Mid-Atlantic region (and beyond) convened to talk content management.

Educational web managers are often lonely, misunderstood geeks who are crucial members of the communications staff but get unfairly lumped in with IT.

These dedicated souls must synthesize content for a variety of audiences (faculty, administration, parents, alumni, students) while also single-handedly updating calendars, uploading forms, and managing schedules.

As Web content management tools have evolved, so too have the responsibilities of the people who manage this content. Gone are the days when a site's webmaster wrapped content with HTML and created Web-safe graphics.

As a matter of fact, we feel a more than little funny even using the word webmaster these days -- it sort of conjures up visions of browsers past, when AJAX was still found under the kitchen sink and the <BLINK> tag was just a glimmer in a madman's eye.