Canadian portal Canoe.ca will adopt a new content management system designed to optimize searchresults and increase its search engine profile.
The site received an overhaul recently and wasrelaunched in July of this year. But this has more to do with cosmetic changes andimprovedlook and feel, said Patrick Lauzon, executive vice-president atQuebecor, Canoe’sparent company. “The French portal and the English portal weren’taligned – onewas a dot-com and the other was a dot-ca,” he said.
In fact, it could be some time before Canoe.ca,Quebecor’sshowcase Web site, is moved over to the new CMS. The company isstarting small,said Lauzon, before it tackles Canoe. The first of Quebecor’s 325 printproperties to find itself in a new online environment is one of itssmall dailynewspapers, which will act as a test site.
“We’ll do tests on the first one to make sure we’reextracting all the capabilities, but hopefully after that it will bemorestreamlined,” he said.
The rest of Quebecor’s periodicals, includingCanoe, willfollow but it could take up to two years.
The CMS selected by Quebecor, based in Montreal, isfrom Canadian software provider NStein.The company is well known for serving large media companies, saidLauzon – publisherTranscontinental Media also uses its products – so it was an obviouschoice.
NStein is also known for its site searchcapabilities andsearch engine optimization. “That indexing will be very important dueto thefact that we have so many properties in-house,” he said.
The decision to move to NStein was made in themonths afterLauzon joined the company, he said. It quickly became apparent thatQuebecorneeded to follow a new online strategy. The company had relied onin-housedevelopment previously and had accrued a number of mismatched contentmanagement systems running various Web properties.
“We evaluated a few (other CMS products) andselected NSteinbased on their media capabilities,” said Lauzon. “From what we’ve heardtheintegration is fairly easy – its not seamless – but it’s fairly easy.”
The move will be accomplished using Quebecor’s ownonline ITstaff with some support and services from NStein.
“We supply our CMS mainly to media and pressorganizations,”said Rina Marchand, marketing manager at Montreal-based NStein, whoadded thattext-mining is key to the CMS’s search optimization capabilities.
The transition from Quebecor’s old online softwareto thenew system should run fairly smoothly, she said: “Because one of thekeycomponents is using an XML repository. It’s quite easy to repurpose theassets.”
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