Phil Gibson - Marketing | Building Brand Experience
Phil Gibson - Marketing | Building Brand Experience

Web Site Content Management

Content managment is one of those things that is easy to describe and painful in real practice.  The fundamental guidelines that I can give everyone relate to content creation and modularity.  This sets aside the basics of development, staging, and production release of content.  Those topics are covered well in any manual and are just plain required.  Much of content management design is a compromise based on your strategy.  The more control you put in place, the slower your update cycle is likely to be.  The fewer the layers, the riskier the result.  It's all about trade offs.

 

I knew many web masters in the early days that ran a basic single tier system with immediate updates.  Those are fine until you have an embarrassing hacking event.  Please move quickly away from live updates of your production face for your own safety.  Multi-layer systems are just harder to break.  Please consider how the updates will propagate through your approval process and what kind of controls you want to have in place.  This will help you sleep at night and recover from surprises should they ever happen. 

 

Assuming you have perfect component information standards and document guidelines that are enforced across your company, the rest is easy.  Nest your content augmentation writers as your source or very close to your source and make it easy for them to pull information from those component and document standards into your new content capture systems. Your writers can be as creative as they like and their updates will always be aligned with the source data.

 

If your source data is well formed (standardized), you may be able to auto populate large chunks of your useful content.  This leads us to the second part of the content framework.  Optimize your content as modular chunks of information with guidelines on format and size limitations.  When the modules are gathered together, you have a complete presentation.  Gathered in subsequent ways, the modules can create a slightly different story with different highlights.  The building of these outlines will help you refine your document standards and the cycle of improvement can continue.

 

The methods you use for content creation and modularity can enable instant publishing options throughout your network.  The myriad of hand held and desk top display sizes can be well handled with a well thought out publishing model.  Please also build your publishing architecture with eCommerce as a part of your plan.  eCommerce is not an afterthought.  You want to include it as a standard content component in every architecture.

 

 

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This Web site is aimed at capturing some of the basic concepts I use when creating integrated marketing programs and leveraging the internet.

 

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