One Taxonomy To Rule Them All: How to Integrate your CMS & AMS
A shared taxonomy (across your sites, your AMS, your meetings, etc.) is the key to better content and user experience. In this series of blog posts, we’ll define taxonomy, tell you why it’s important and show you how to develop and implement one.
How to integrate your CMS and AMS
You’ve developed a great taxonomy and now need to integrate it across your content and your AMS. How do you do that?
Prepping Your Content: Content prep is key. Work with your in-house staff and/or your web vendor to help you figure out the easiest way to categorize all your content.
- Within your CMS
- Implement categories – does your CMS already have a system in place? If so, use it. If content already has categories, map the old categories to the new set and work with your CMS/web vendor to migrate the information. Often, this can be done with a data script. If you don’t have a categorization scheme already, start now. Pick the top 20% of your existing content and categorize it.
- Top 20% may be new or old content or a mix. Sometimes, older content can be extremely valuable to a particular topic.
- Train staff on how to categorize
- With every new piece of content that gets entered, each content item needs to be categorized to match the new taxonomy scheme. Hold training sessions for all staffers who enter content and emphasize its importance.
- Implement categories – does your CMS already have a system in place? If so, use it. If content already has categories, map the old categories to the new set and work with your CMS/web vendor to migrate the information. Often, this can be done with a data script. If you don’t have a categorization scheme already, start now. Pick the top 20% of your existing content and categorize it.
- Within your AMS
- Implement categories into all content modules – as with the CMS, whatever content modules exist with your AMS should be categorized using the new taxonomy scheme. Work with your AMS vendor to establish these categories.
- Train staff on how to categorize
- As with the CMS, the membership & meetings staff (and anyone else who uses the AMS regularly) will need training on the new taxonomy. Hold training sessions and demonstrate how the AMS categorization works with the CMS categorization to provide an enriched user experience on your site.