The following calculation only determines the specific return on investment realized by decreased costs of building and maintaining a site using a content management system. These cost savings are realized when the real development costs of building a static site are compared to the costs of building a dynamically updated site that uses templates.

They do not take into account the costs of lost customer or revenue because customers don’t have easily accessible or up to date information about your services.

The following formula deals with initial site building. Cost savings are also realized with the decreased maintenance costs of a template-based system.

Ø Cost Savings = Cost of developing pages on static site – cost of developing pages on dynamic site

Ø Cost of developing pages on static site = (web developer salary * 4 hours/page) + (web designer salary * 2 hours/page) x number of pages

Ø Cost of developing pages on Dynamic site = (cost of template development /number of pages)

Ø Cost of template development = (web developer salary * 4 hours/template) + (web designer salary x 2 hours/template) * number of templates

To estimate the actual ROI of a content management system you must also evaluate the level of improvement such a system provides by costing all factors. Below is a guideline for calculating enterprise wide ROI of implementing a web content management system, including the benefits of improved communication and content.

Ø Return = (Cost Savings + Increased Content Value + Innovation) * Probability of Adoption

Ø Cost Savings = standardization + resource utilization + cost of updates + retrieval time

Ø Content Value = message value * relevance * timeliness * accuracy * suitability + branding

Ø Innovation = developer tool suitability + integration compatibility * reduced time to deploy

Ø Probability of Adoption = IT compatibility * business user suitability * scalability

Ø Investment = number of users * (process change + training costs) + system cost + design cost