The dark side of the CMS

There has never been so much bad photography as there is now. Why? Because mobile camera phones and cheap digital cameras have made enthusiastic snappers out of a huge proportion of the population, most of whom don't have the first idea how to create a compelling image.

Check out Flickr's most recent photos and you'll see what I mean. There's page after page of mostly ill-conceived and boring photos.

It's always been this way when advances in digital technology put the power of creation in ordinary people's hands. The advent of user-friendly page layout programs unleashed a tsunami of badly designed documents, as business took their graphic design in-house. The first wave of web design tools helped populate the web with ghastly looking sites built by business owners with zero design knowledge.

And so it is with content management systems. They make it much easier for businesses to update their websites. And so they also make it much easier to publish poor quality content that erodes brand equity.

Businesses need to seriously consider not only how they update their website, but who is going to create the content updates. My advice is to appoint a qualified editor or site manager to ensure only top quality content appears on the site. If there's no one in-house they can always hire a freelancer to make periodic updates. All staff that contribute content should be briefed on writing for the web.