We had a discussion today about Web content management. This discussion involved David Waldron (CITO), John Hopkins (Associate Vice President for College Relations and Marketing), Janet Russell (Director of Instructional Technology), Peter James (Director of Web Services), and myself. What is at issue is a way to allow faculty, students, and student organizations to create and manage a website without the need for learning HTML. There were a couple of options that were discussed: Dreamweaver/Contribute and a Web based content management system (WCMS) using a database to store content (Mambo for example).

Neither solution seems to be a clear winner. Dreamweaver is very expensive and would require a lot of training to allow people to create nice looking websites. A WCMS would allow for easy content creation and updating but would lack flexibilty in styling. Nothing was decided and further discussions will be held, but a decision must be made by April.

A good source for a discussion of the issues can be found at Shorewalker.com.