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The 3D HLX Process:
Design : Content Management Plan
In Draft
All information in a site is some form of content. Considering this, the management of that content is critical to successful operation of the site during deployment. Content management is analogous to inventory management, without large web sites become chaos. Even small sites need some plan for handling content.
Check List
At the beginning of this step the following should have be established:
- The Hypertext Team has
- a clear understanding of the client's needs and the audience's needs.
- background information on the client and when possible the audience.
- an organized list of specific needs, ways to meet the needs, and how the needs relate to one another.
Understanding Content Management
Content management is a remarkably straight forward concept. Regrettably, a great number of companies have worked very hard to "mystify" in order to sell their services and software products. Behind the smoke and mirrors, there is nothing special or difficult about managing content.
There are many flavors of content management. First, consider what content is. Content is the presentation of information in the form of text, images, video, audio or any form of media. Books, magazines, pamplets, and business cards are all content in the form of documents. Sections, chapters, pages, paragraphs, sentences and words are also all content in the form of parts of a larger work. Content management can be performed at any level. One common form of content management is document management.
Document management is the simplest form of content management. It is well suited to traditional print media since a deliverable document is goal of any project. The cataloging systems used in libraries are one form of document management. Filing cabintes and folders on your computer's harddive are also a form of document management. The purpose of a document management system is to make it easy to store and retreive whole documents. Each conceivable system for working with documents has costs and benefits. The dewy decimal system is complex and involves a lot of overhead, but it very effective for large collections of documents. Filing cabinets and computer folders require less overhead and can be optimized to the user's preference, they are not effective ways to store large numbers of documents being accessed by large numbers of people.
Content management is no different than document management except the unit of information being operated on. Content is most often broken up into chunks smaller than a single document. This makes it possible to recombine content chunks in different ways to create different documents. This practice is often used to facilitate content repurposing and reuse. The appropriate size of one chunk depends on the application.
There are six basic operations that are commonly performed on content. They are creating, editing, destroying, versioning, classifying, and indexing. Some forms of content management may only address some of the operations, but most at least handle creation, edits, and destruction. Versioning is the process of keeping multiple copies of content based on one or more edits that have been performed. Classifying content makes it possible to attach useful meta-data to content such as who created it, what the content is about, who the content is for, and so on. Indexing content makes searching for content faster and may be based on classification of the content, the information in the content itself, or both.
The final factor in content management is now it is performed. Traditional content management was handled by people following a procedure. This form of content management is a Content Management Process (CMP) . CMPs are flexible and easy to begin using since they don't require any special software. The downside of CMP is it requires active participation on the part of all individuals working on the content, and the weakest link in the chain is the limiting factor. The other way to manage content is with a Content Management System (CMS). The CMS is usualy some form of software that enables people to perform some or all of the operations to content based on a set of rules. The strong suit of a CMS is that it ensures the rules for handling content are followed. The downside is CMS can involve complicated and often expensive software.
Fortunately, there is a wide range of possible solutions for content management that mix CMP and CMS. By balancing the strengths and weaknesses of each form of content management it is possible to come up with an ideal solution for any web site.
Measuring the Client's Capacity
Before any content management solutions are explored it is first important to take careful inventory of the client's technological capacity. Every aspect of a web site needs to be tailored to the client and audience. The back-end pieces are one area where client needs trump audience expectations, and content management is usualy an aspet of the web site only the client will deal with. Measuring the client's capacity for for implementing CMP and CMS is a job for Technical Staff and the Maintainer.
A big factor in determining what solution is right for a client is examining how they currently produce content. Projects can fail or proceed poorly during deployment if the client is unable or unwilling to adopt the CMS/CMP developed for the site. It is almost universally the case that clients will have content managment capacity. It is important to work with the client to come up with a solution that either brings them up to speed, or at the very least raises them to a minimal level where they can realisticly manage their web site.
The best strategy when dealing with clients that are behind is to push, not pull their content. This simply means it is better to work with what the client already has first before trying to migrate them to something new. If your client already has productivity software, they have a means of producing content. The problem lies in refining their content to the level needed to make daily operations on their web site feasible. Explore possiblities that involve getting content from their existing software to the web before attempting to move your client to new software. When migration to new software is required it is vital to involve both the client's management and staff in the switch. There is no easy solution for changing the way people work, and migrating content is a long and tricky process.
See Also: Minimal Content for Migration
Some options for content management open up when the client has their own IT staff to handle the site during deployment . Meeting with the client's technical support staff can give the project team ideas as to what solutions would be easy to implement and what would be hard. If IT already works with a particular software package, database, or other technology, solutions involving something already familiar to the client would naturaly be a plus. Even if the system involves some new pieces, any components that the client already has experince with will make the transition easier.
Some IT groups have the capacity to deploy and support new software packages, others do not. Some IT groups will be enthusiatic (even if cautiously so) about any solution that makes it easier for their users to perform tasks that currently require intervention from IT. On the flip side most non-technical staff will resist taking on new responsibilities. Any transitions that can be made gradually will be easier to push.
Analyzing the Client's Content
Another factor that will dictate what content management solutions will and will not work is the nature of the content created by the client. Most often content management for the web is a small peice in a much larger puzzle of all the data management a client performs. Even clients that do not have CMP/CMS for their web sites often have some form of database for working with business information. In the case of some intranet sites the CMS will need to interface with this data, in others it may not. Few clients are willing to comit to a project that replaces their existing infrastucture just so their web site can work seamlessly with day-to-day operations.
Content comes in a variety of forms and there is no good "one size fits all" solution. Few clients work with only one form of content, though the web site they need may only require one or two basic content types. Identifying various forms of content and how they should be structured is a job for the Information Architect and Subject Expert.
Forms of content differ in the type of information they contain, and the way in which they are presented. A shopping list and a shopping receipt are good examples of related, but unique forms of content. Both contain a list of items and both may contain quantities or amounts. At the same time a shopping list is usually simpler than a receipt. Receipts contain additional bits of information such as prices, tax, payment method, location and date to name a few. Receipts from different stores may contain roughly the same information, but present it in slightly different orders. Since the presentation of content is arbitrary, and a task to be handled by a different team, the hypertext team is primarily concerned with the type of information the content contains, the content type.
Understanding Content Types
Each type of content has an implied structure that, other than a default reading order, has nothing to do with the way the information is presented. This structure dictates what information the content may or may not contain. It would not make any sense, for example, to encounter a paragraph of narrative text in the middle of a shopping list. Similarly, it would not make sense for a phone number to contain a bullted list. Both phone numbers and shopping lists are content types that have an implied structure.
Some forms of content are highly structured. The telephone number is one example of a highly structured content type. In the United States a normal phone numbers have three numerical digits followed by a dash and four more numerical digits. While there are many variations on the basic format of a phone number in different situations, the basic concept remains the same. Content that is highly structured can be checked for validity against the expected structre by a computer program. This makes it possible to enforce the structure of the content, a common feature in a CMS.
On the other end of the spectrum, unstructured content has no rules. If content is truley unstructured then anything goes and, as one might expect, the content may very well be hard to interpret. In real world applications all content has some structure. Language itself enforces contentions on writing and speech to ensure that information is understandable at some basic level. Words, Sentences, and Paragraphs are all units of structure.
By convention, various types of documents have loose rules of structure. HTML in general is a content type that has a few specific rules about how various units of information may be arranged, but otherwise the organizaion is arbitraty. In HTML the TITLE tag always appears in the HEAD tag and TABLE tags contain TR tags (for columns) which in turn contain TD tags (for cells). A TD tag should not appear outside of a TR tag and no content should appear in a TR tag other than the TD tag. Other than a few rules of structure HTML is a very flexible content type and ideal way to present information in a wide variety of layouts.
Many useful content structures are complex and have some flexibility. Complex content structures might be made by grouping multiple simple, but structured content types. A purchace order is one example of a complex content structure made of many smaller parts. A purchace order often contains the address, phone number, and billing information of the recipient, which are each structred content types. The purchase order also likely contains a list of purchased items with information about each item such as unit and price.
Planning for Content Types
When limited to a CMP, the best measure of control that can be hoped for in managing
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Check List
At the end of this step
the following should have been accomplished:
- The Project Team has
- a clear understanding of the client's needs and the audience's needs.
- a properly balanced work force to meet the project's requirements.
- background information on the client and when possible the audience.
- an organized list of specific needs, ways to meet the needs, and how the needs relate to one another.
- The Client has
- an idea of how the planning will procede.
- an understanding of the importance of meeting the audience's expectations.
Preparing For the Next Step
During the next step the project team will perform three separate tasks to further plan the site. The content management plan, planning for the navigational flow, and layout flow planning can each begin. Even though these three processes are inter-related each can begin immediately. Once some key decisions are made in the content management plan the navigational flow can proceed. Similarly, the layout flow cannot go very far until some decisions are reached regarding the navigational flow.
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