As a regular observer and sometimes participant in group discussions on the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) Communications listserv, I get an insider’s view of the challenges facing prospective clients. A recent post from a PR director at a college I won’t name, was seeking advice about the merits of using WordPress for managing his institution’s online newsroom. The post generated a number of replies from group members, most of which – well all except mine – were encouraging.

Before you jump to conclusions, I did not bash WordPress. Instead, I wondered why this fellow wouldn’t create and manage the newsroom with the same CMS used for his school’s main website.

Of course, communications managers and marketers are attracted to WordPress because it is perceived as easy to use and affordable. It exists along with a universe of third-party plug-ins, templates and related add-ons, which one supposes gives WordPress near super-human abilities. (Gosh, I’ve seen people compare WordPress to Drupal…(OK, I’ll behave.)) So, it would be perfect for creating an online newsroom right?

Wrong. As a recent post by Irina Guseva, CMS analyst with the Real Story Group points out, when it comes to CMS, C stands for complexity – yes, this applies to that cute, little WordPress newsroom too. What’s more, when it comes to a college or university website, the CMS is only a small piece of a larger set of operational and governance issues.

Yes, sadly, in most cases, when you find a college website that is not delivering on the value promised when it was conceived, it is not because of the CMS – though often the CMS is vilified. Instead, take a look at the leadership, strategy, policies and procedures – the overall governance of the site and you’ll find the true weak link in the chain of value creation.

Returning to the matter of using WordPress for an online newsroom, it turns out the reason this PR director wanted to use WordPress instead of the school’s main CMS, was because the school was managing its main website manually – no CMS! People were updating the site using Dreamweaver and notepad, which created a significant bottleneck for the PR team.

In this case, with no other CMS, perhaps introducing WordPress into the environment might make sense. For other institutions, where the main website runs on an established CMS, building a new sub-site on WordPress – or any other CMS – where that sub-site is managing and delivering standard-issue Web content (a newsroom is pretty basic) strikes me as adding unnecessary complexity and cost to an already taxed environment. Yup, I can’t think of too many university clients where the Web teams were holding back on cash and time…

But, you might be thinking, what about a fully hosted instance of WordPress – there’s not much to do once it’s set up. Not a chance… There is always – and I mean always – going to be something that goes wrong or needs additional configuration (remember those third-party plug-ins and templates), administration or customization. None of this is free and sometimes time is of the essence (like when your site goes down or features stop working with the next release of Firefox, IE, etc. ).

So, as you non-technical marketers and communicators think about adding departmental sites and sub-sites built on WordPress or other platforms, take into account the added cost and complexity. And more important, take a step back and consider your organization’s overall approach for operating its Web properties. What’s working, what’s broken and what can you do to help drive better results.

For some guidance, check out our free report, Opening the Virtual Front Door to Campus: Effective Web Strategy in Higher Education, written by Melissa Richards, marketing director at Virginia Tech, with contributions from Web experts at Johns Hopkins and the University of Alabama.

Cheers!