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Contented Management

Contented Management

Your website shall go the ball

Is yours a Cinderella website? Does it have an inner beauty that’s hidden away in some corner of the internet that potential Prince Charmings never visit? Does it suffer at the hands of a step-mother whose only interest is self-aggrandisement rather than nurturing their charge?

Get your website out of the scullery!

Promoting your web presence isn’t about just finding some kind of SEO godmother so you can trend on Twitter or make a splash on Google. You need to have content that’s stimulating, up-to-date and relevant to your target audience. If you simply tart up your presentation and wave it under people’s noses, your website will be about as popular as the ugly sisters.

So how do you get to the ball?

1. Make your content presentable.
Cleanse, freshen, and exfoliate! Remove anything that’s unsightly or redundant, accentuate your positive features by promoting them in your navigation and ensure that your design is focussed on your users’ needs.

2. Get out and network.
Once you have a website you think people will want to visit, you’ll need some kind of vehicle for getting your website in front of them. The channels that you use will depend on your target audience, but clearly SEO, social networking profiles and non-web media are all legitimate ways of getting yourself noticed. Unlike Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage, however, there needs to be honesty in the way you promote yourself. Habitat shot themselves in the foot recently by tagging their sales tweets with keywords about the Iranian election. Similarly if people are drawn to your website because it has popular but irrelevant keyword matches, they’re not going to hang around for long.

3. Keep that glass slipper.
Once you’ve got people to visit your site and experience your well-presented content, you need something to keep them coming back. RSS feeds are an obvious way of doing this, but you need to keep publishing good content if you want the party to carry on past midnight.

There’s not much point in having a website that’s an ugly sister – in your face but unattractive – or that’s beautiful but unknown. Every little website can grow up to be a princess if you can just show off its inner beauty.

Some further reading:

As a brief aside, did you know that Cinderella’s name comes from having her behind covered in cinders because she used to sit in the chimney to keep warm? And that her slippers were made from squirrel fur: vair in French, converted to verre (glass) by Charles Perrault to make the story more magical. Honest, guv’nor.

Philippe Parker on , | 26 June 2009

Contented Management

We’re not just policing your content

Contented Management has joined forces with Linea to develop an online application and candidate management system for the Metropolitan Police. The system, which went live earlier this month, has already taken on appications for nearly 300 Special Constables and will shortly go live for Police Officers, Community Support Officers (PCSO) and police staff.

Candidates can check the progress of their applications online through integration with an enterprise offline system managed by the Met’s HR department.

The application was audited by a third party security consultancy and is built using the Java Struts 2.0 framework.

Visit metpolicecareers.co.uk and contact info@contentedmanagement.net to find out more.

Philippe Parker on 25 June 2009

Contented Management

CMS trade-in deals

Fatwire is waiving licence fees for clients who migrate to its CMS from Vignette or Interwoven. Both these vendors have traditionally had quite expensive licensing models so there are potentially big savings to be made, although FatWire has a feature set that is probably closer to Vignette than to Interwoven.

The catch is that you need to procure migration services through FatWire, but they’ve partnered with content migration specialists who you’d probably use anyway. You just lose some flexibility on negotiating the price, but you’re going to be saving money anyway.

But does that make it a worthwhile exercise? As Irina Guseva points out, the project inevitably costs more than the licence, so the cost of migrating may well be more than your existing Vignette or Interwoven maintenance costs.

More importantly, the reasons for migrating are wrong. You shouldn’t abandon your CMS just because you can get a better deal elsewhere. It’s not like switching an electricity supplier to get a better rate. Just moving from one CMS platform to another is unlikely to resolve the content management issues you’ve been experiencing. You need to think about which problems you’re going to solve then pick the processes and technologies that will address these.

FatWire’s rescue package doesn’t make a business case to move away from Vignette or Interwoven, but it does put the product on the shortlist if you are migrating. For dynamic-driven Java websites, you have to consider FatWire, but it’s not a shorlist of one. Remember, open source products don’t have licence costs either.

So let’s commend FatWire for their marketing effort, and if you’re looking to migrate from a platform other that those mentioned, ask FatWire if they’ll cut you the same deal. But don’t trade in your existing CMS just to get a better price. Address your issues, conduct due diligence and pick a product that meets your requirements.

A couple of useful links:

Philippe Parker on , , | 16 June 2009

Contented Management

Ditch useless content

Historically, web content management and records management have been at two different ends of the content management spectrum: web was all about time-to-market while records were about defining what you could get away with deleting. As web has increasingly become a channel for storing and sharing business-critical content (both within and beyond the firewall), you need to consider how long you can afford to hold onto your web content for.

Typically, retention policies are based on regulatory requirements, but it’s also a matter of reducing clutter. Most information we have at our disposal is useless: getting rid of it is going to help you get to useful content far more quickly.

So how do you sift wheat from chaff and decide what should stay and what should go? You have a number of options:

1. Stock-take

Spider your website every six months to get the last updated date for every page. Assign someone to go through every page that’s over six months old and decide if it’s valuable. If it is, update its last updated date; if not, remove it.

Pros: simple to implement.

Cons: a time-consuming and pretty blunt instrument.

2. Rolling assessments

Slightly more effective than a six-monthly stock take is a rolling approach, which you can do by setting a workflow status in your CMS to alert you to review each piece of content six months after its been published. The review cycle is therefore becomes business as usual rather than an arduous project.

Pros: spreads the workload, covers content that isn’t spider-able (such as reserved, non-public content).

Cons: still treats all content as equal, irrespective of its real value.

3. Pre-classification

Use either of the above methods in combination with metadata attached to the content. When you first publish your content, classify it as strategic or tactical. You can also add classifications for legal purposes (such as content covered under the data protection act). The different classifications then attract different review cycles: you review strategic content every year but tactical content after 6 weeks. You can add as many classifications as suit your needs and tie them to content types automatically within the CMS; for example, research publications are always strategic while press releases are always tactical. You can also automate the removal of these pieces of content using the CMS workflow.

Pros: flexible, extendable approach to retention; simple to implement with editorial guidance.

Cons: you’ll probably need to do an initial stock take of your existing content in order to perform the initial classification.

You still need to decide how you archive your web content: do you simply delete a page completely, or do you archive off a section of the site to a flat-file copy so that you can refer to it if necessary?

Whether you archive or delete, removal of useless content is an essential activity for all large website owners. Implementing a web content retention policy will bring real benefits to your organisation beyond the world of compliance. Less clutter brings easier content management, simpler information architecture and better access to relevant information for your user base. It’s an essential de-tox, so get deleting!

Key reading:

Philippe Parker on | 2 June 2009