Content management¹ systems for websites like Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla provide simple forms for website content providers to fill out. When the content is ready to be published, the content provider hits a button and, poof, new content for the website. CMSs allow people to focus on content, the real heart of a website, and not be impeded by coding and technological barriers.

You can't really use something until you learn how, right?

So user satisfaction with a website in most cases is going to depend on how fast your visitor can learn to use the site and its fetures to get her what she wants. It is the place usability begins and it begins most happily when your visitor didn't give it a thought. Read Steve Krug's very powerful but simple book, Don't Make Me Think.

Recently a prospective client was told by a developer, "Drupal¹? No one uses that anymore."

Whoever said that is at best really misinformed. Drupal powers thousands of sites around the world. Now the communications team that supports the leader of the free world has chosen Drupal to run the White House website.

Every now and then a marketing effort hits the jackpot and the lines form and the cash register rings. Someone writes a blog that goes viral and brings in oceans of traffic. Your PR firm gets you placement in a hot pub. Oprah recommends your book.

Whether you spend $100,000 for a Microsoft Sharepoint setup or you sign up for a free account on the social networking site Ning, your internet is not going to do its job if the content sucks.

One way that content fails is when it's pushed down by the big boys in corporate communications, HR and IT. To counteract that, Paul Chin suggests getting users involved. He posted a great list on ways you might increase the traffic to your intranet.

Mark Morrell of the British Internet giant, BT, posted a blog today describing how BT makes money on its corporate intranet.

One income stream is advertising, which Morrell says brings in, "...several hundred thousands of pounds each year." The other is a deal with Yahoo. If BT intranetters click a Yahoo search link on the BT intranet, BT participates in the income from any "paid search" ads that are clicked on the Yahoo site. Obviously, BT is a huge company.

I was elated by this news from St. Clair, Alabama, population 80,000. The school board there is committing to an intranet¹.

Board members are going paperless in their jobs, using an intranet site to retrieve and share information. They reason that they are putting technology to work in schools to help students keep pace with technology, and they need to be setting the example.

I told a client recently that too few people were signing up on the Pay Pal page compared to the people visiting the page. In other words, analytics showed visitors were going to the "Buy Now" page and then not signing up. Of course that got me wringing my  hands and wondering why.

If your intranet¹ is connected to the Internet, you can hook up Google Analytics and get quite a bit of information about how your intranet is being used.

Mark Twain said, "There are three kind of liars: liars, damn liars and statistics."