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Laura Robertson Do you love your CMS? Laura Robertson asked the audience at her Confab 2019 talk whether any of them loved their CMS. In a room of 750 people, only one hand went up. This sad state of affairs has prompted Laura to reflect deeply on content management systems. Laura and I talked about: her content strategy practice in London, working mostly with non-profit organizations where there is room for improvement in content management systems: most CMSs were designed to publish websites and web pages, whereas now we publish to many different platforms, voice, social media, email, and apps and other ways to deliver content most CMSs have been developed tech-first, not content-first which results in systems-led attitudes, seeing content as an add-on to a tech system her experience with several CMSs, and her discovery of the same issues and related organizational cultural issues how content strategy is largely about people how traditional CMSs fail to consider the needs of authors, editors, and other back-end users how there's no easy fix to this problem because it's not just a technical issue how you can't always blame the tech, that technical people with content skills can overcome many of the issues in current CMSs how the conversation around CMSs tends to focus on technical issues and how we as content people could spend more time at tech events and otherwise reaching out to our tech colleagues how our use of tools like Google Docs might help start conversations around workflow improvements in CMSs how closing the actual physical distance between content people and CMS administrators, actually working side-by-side, can improve our experience with CMSs how to move content concerns up sooner in the sequence of building a website the importance of including content strategy as early as possible in website and other projects her favorite quote from Carrie Hane and Mike Atherton's Designing Connected Content: "You want to build your tool to fit the model, not model your content to fit the tool." the importance of a content-first approach to content system design how starting with a focus on content models, users needs, and internal users and starting with a blank canvas can improve content systems Karen McGrane's famous Content in a Zombie Apocalypse talk and how we need to stop thinking in terms of blobs and more about chunks of content how newer technical solutions are starting to embrace concepts like domain models and modular content the emergence of tools like GatherContent and Contentful and how they help the authoring process the enduring attitudinal issue of content being the poor relation of design and development the importance of continuing to try to work our way into the conversation with the tech folks so that more hands Laura's Bio Laura is a content strategist at Contentious, the London-based agency she co-founded. She helps non-profits and campaigners with their content strategy, focusing on shifting to a more modular and user-centered approach (and eradicating double spaces along the way!). She believes in putting content first and people and planet at the heart of everything. Laura speaks French and Spanish and has lived in Argentina, Colombia, France and Mexico. Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/HA_bU6OxPYA Transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 45 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I'm really happy today to have with us Laura Robertson. Laura is a Content Strategist and Co-founder at Contentious, an Agency in London. And I met her at a conference a few weeks ago and we had... She did a lightning talk about CMSs and there are others, maybe a little bit of room for improvement there. And so that's why I invited Laura on the show. So welcome Laura. You want to tell the folks a little bit more about yourself and what you're up to? Laura: