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How Are You Managing Your Web Content?


April 2004 "Life is like a library owned by an author. In it are a few books which he wrote himself, but most of them were written for him."


While these Harry Emerson Fosdick words are philosophical ponderings about life, any project manager of a Web site design team can relate. While the Web library of our organizations may be owned by the stockholders, the responsibility of maintaining and updating the Web site is the mission of a select group of people. This group must integrate and accommodate content authored by the masses including employees past and present of the organization, vendors, customers, licensed intellectual property, and many more.
 
How can our organizations stay on top of all this content, keep it organized, identify gaps in content, and keep the knowledge accurate? This challenge grows as our Web sites mature and the content hosted on our Web sites (Internet, intranet, and extranet) exponentially multiplies. The online issue is a microcosm of the organizationally matter; how can we stay on top of all our content -- email, IMail, documents, spreadsheets, reports, faxes, and more?
 
Tools of the trade. A recent survey by the Yankee Group found that medium and large businesses continue to adopt software solutions to manage, store, retrieve, and publish content. Over the next 12-18 months, 58 percent of the surveyed companies "plan to increase investment in portal technologies" and 63 percent "plan to increase investment in enterprise content management systems."
 
Instead of responding to the entire content problem with a simple solution, a comprehensive solution requires modularizing specific answers to specific elements. Thus, the utopic result may include document management (think real paperless), enterprise content management, and Web content management (WCM). Since, this column is intended to focus on WCM, I met with Dale Young, VP for Maryland-based Systems Alliance to discuss WCM. We discussed how to select a product and features that differentiate WCM from other software tools. Dale’s firm has developed a comprehensive product, one of many available, called SiteExecutive (SiteExecutive.com).
 
Business problems solved. Software worthy of adopting must address business needs, and WCM products are no exception. Web site issues addressed may include the following:
  1. Dead links. The larger and more layered a Web site, the more likely that unintended destinations of links are deleted or even never posted with the correct file name. Site visitors and users can be frustrated or even disenfranchised when the sites reliability is undermined in such a way. 
  2. Empowering the information owner to control (author) their own information. Passing the responsibility for content creation and maintenance to the technical staff of the Web site team dislocates the publishing of content from the knowledge experts of the subject matter. Still, we are reticent to turn all our content creators into Web site publishing experts. It is inefficient and likely to create many new headaches.
  3. Quickly updating the Web site. As the volume of content increases, staying timely with updates and revisions of that content is challenging. We have all visited Web sites looking for critical data about a vendor or customer only to find that content dated and not recently generated.
  4. Imposing a consistent Web site look and feel. As content proliferates, the ability to enforce a uniform interface for the user of that content is more difficult. The content may be coming from many sources, each with his/her preference of how things should look. These content creators combine to create an abstract artist's view of a Web site and its navigation.
  5. Cost to manage and distribute. As content grows, so does the cost of managing it. Tools to control, consolidate, and even reduce that cost are necessary with the growing Web site.
Choosing a WCM product. All WCM are not equal, either in price or in feature offering. In choosing the product that may be right for you, consider the following:
  1. Learning. "Will I have to hire expensive programmers?" Can my non-technical people be building pages "within an hour"? The goal is quick learning.
  2. Ease of use. Just because a product does not require a lot of learning before it is used does not mean it is easy to use. A WCM solution should be easy to use and modify using both provided documentation and training, as well as an ability to expand features for specific purposes like integration with other tools to manage enterprise content.
  3. Globalization. Web sites are published for international users. Content will be read worldwide ideally in many languages. The capacity to perform multi-language publishing with spell check is valuable to many organizations. This publishing should not be a literal translation, but one that is more sensitive to the idiomatic presentation of content for those languages.
  4. Localization. On the other hand, there are specifics that may warrant classifying content by geographic or demographic profile. The mass customization of content by can assist the user in identifying appropriate content for a specific situation.
  5. Replication. While dynamic generation of content pages is ideal, many of our Web sites are replicated and stored globally for strategic latency (load balancing and bandwidth) or disaster preparedness reasons. Therefore, we must also be able to build static pages for those worldwide servers.
  6. Enterprise connectivity. WCM is not a portal or document management software. Linking and interacting with these and other enterprise content tools is essential.
  7. Security. Rarely should every type of user have access to all content. WCM security should build in means of authenticating users and determining rights to type of content.
  8. Belief. Does the vendor use their own product? The best first reference for an enterprise software product is the vendor.
Beware: The proliferation of content on a Web site increases the potential that the underlying content contains problems. As we undertake initiatives for content management, we must also develop and articulate clear policies and procedures to comply with all legal requirements for that content. We must also protect this storehouse of data from accidental or careless accessibility to the wrong reader can allow for information theft, misuse, or worst.
 
CHAIM YUDKOWSKY, CPA, CITP, is president of Byte of Success Inc., a technology consulting company specializing in helping small and mid-size business grow using technology. He is available for both consultation and speaking. He may be reached at cyudkowsky@byteofsuccess.com.
 

2004 SmartPros Ltd. All rights reserved.

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