The first thing to say about Kentico is that its a Content Management System, and these are usually by their nature quite complex wee beasties to get to grips with. Personally, I don't think this is because they NEED to be, its just the way they're built. I think if Apple decided to have a punt at re-engineering a CMS, they'd make it more user friendly. What you need to do most would be easy to do and would be were you expect it. User centered design. With most CMS' they're built by funny looking people in dark rooms, who put things where they can go, or want them to go, or fit best- which doesn't always make for intuitive design.

Kentico is better than most though. The screen is laid out in a fairly standard pattern, with a navigation column, a content column and a row of buttons above both. What you navigate to depends on how you're deployment of Kentico is set up, but either through navigation and button pushing, or through using the right mouse button you'll soon get to where you want to.

Once you get to writing or adding in content, this is easy too - using a standard WYSIWYG approach - you edit, make things bold, different colours and you see this reflected on screen. What you're writing and what type of content it is affects whether you edit the page directly as it appears on the web, or whether its via a form. For me, writing this blog, I'm using a form, but for other WebProductive pages, like 'About', is editted firmly in situ.  Working with a lot of different CMS' the preview functionality isn't great, so being able to edit 'in situ' on the 'finished page' is lovely.

There are two very good first impressions. Firstly, the interface that a content writer works with on a day to day basis isn't that cluttered and doesn't confuse, bewilder or annoy. Secondly, once you get over the CMSiness of it, the things you need to click and press to make things happen, add styling or create new pages is all fairly self explanatory - Working on a document in Kentico feels a lot like working on one on an online word processor like Google Docs.

So overall and so far, knowing the power this thing brings to our organisation, I'd have to say 9 out of 10!

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