CMS vs PDF, sorting the alphabet soup

In my article Abandoning Print, I teased that we were going to have an overview look at some of the more common ways to take a traditionally printed publication to the Web. In that article I referred to magazines to illustrate the narrative, but the truth is, this information applies to more than just magazines. Creating digital versions of things like brochures or information packets might well even be better suited to leaving the print realm for the digital.

Though there are a wide variety of ways to accomplish taking a magazine online, the two most common and easy to execute methods are to create a content managed web site, or to use a PDF viewer solution.

A content managed web site will probably be the more familiar of the two – it’s what you’re viewing right now. Content managed sites use sets of templates and a user friendly interface behind the scenes to allow users to add new articles or edit existing ones without the need to know HTML, CSS or the rest of the alphabet soup used to create web pages. Once a Content Management System (CMS) site is up and running, anyone who can handle MS Word could take on a role in the production of the site. CMS sites also commonly have workflow tools and permissions schema to allow the necessary editorial task to be accomplished with as little pain as possible.

PDF viewers are a little more varied, but in general, a user uploads a PDF to a publishing tool. That PDF is processed by the publishing tool and is rendered as your viewer. One style that might be familiar to a lot of folks is the ‘page-turner’. Page-turners mimic the page flipping of a printed magazine through a few methods, some better executed than others. So if you have ever seen something on the Web that lets you leaf though pages like that, you’ve seen a PDF viewer in action. There are a number of different styled viewers available and many different takes on the page turner even.

Though both methods have the end goal of getting your content out on the Web, they each accomplish this in very different ways, and one method might be better suited to your application over the other. So in the next couple articles, we’ll look at the pluses, minuses and details of each method along with some examples, starting with content managed web sites.