Web Content Management

1
Web Content Management

• Week 8

2
Sites are Big and Getting Bigger
3
Portal

• We index 315 million sites on the Web and sell
  25 million articles, customized reports, and
  news feeds to our subscribers. Its impossible to
  predict growth, but one thing is certain As we
  leverage new partnerships and expand syndication
  to over even more sources, the volume will
  continue to mushroom.

4
Retailer

• We manage 10,000 pages today, but that number
  will triple within 18 months because our product
  line is so complex. There are a dozen unique
  product categories and each product within those
  categories gets promoted, assembled, sold,
  delivered and supported differently. To properly
  accommodate all those variables, well add more
  authors, text, and graphics.

5
Publisher

• Currently we handle 36 million pages distributed
  throughout the six regions we serve in North
  America. Most of this content is news gathered
  from a growing
• number of field correspondents and essayists
  located throughout the regions.
• By next year, we expect to manage around 48
  million pages. ( publisher)

6
(No Transcript)
7
(No Transcript)
8
Evolution of WCM

• In 1991, when the Web was the realm of research
  labs and universities, a few dozen sites received
  perhaps a few thousand accesses, or hits per
  day.
• Less than a decade later there are millions of
  Web sites, many of them receiving thousands of
  hits per hour. With this growth, the challenge of
  providing acceptable service levels to thousands
  of users preoccupies IT organizations.
• Adequate bandwidth and hardware have become
  significant concerns for large organizations that
  depend on the Web as a mission-critical vehicle
  for meeting their business goals.

9
Strategic Importance

• As the strategic importance of corporate Web
  sites has grown, managing critical
• business content efficiently has become a
  major organizational headache.

10
Early Solutions

• Early solutions for managing content were often
  organizational -- one Webmaster soon became a Web
  designer, developer, and producer.
• As people discovered how time-consuming and
  difficult it was to update content or automate
  publishing, many companies developed custom
  programs (using CGIs, perl scripts, or custom
• application-server programs) to address these
  problems.

11
Content Management Products

• Later, commercial content management products
  entered the market to replace these homegrown
  solutions with more reliable and scalable
  systems..

12
Best Practices

• Best practices are identified for managing Web
  Content.
• By using these practices, any organization can
  increase the success and positive business
  results generated by their e-business
  initiatives.
• These practices fall into three high level groups

13
Best Practices

• Content management is about people not just
  content
• Automate costly, time-consuming processes
• Leverage existing assets and skills

14
1. Content management is about people not just
content

• Content has no value unless people are viewing
  it, understanding it, and using it to fulfill a
  business goal.
• At the same time, content will become out of
  date, inaccurate, and of little value without
  active involvement by the people who "own" the
  content.
• Therefore, focusing on people, and their role in
  creating, managing, and using content is critical
  to success.

15
Execute an Audience Driven Design

• A Web site should be designed to enable its
  target audiences to obtain the information they
  are looking for, and execute transactions, as
  easily as possible.

16
Recognition

• One of the key opportunities presented by the Web
  is its ability to recognize and classify the
  audiences who interact with the information it
  holds. Once these key audiences have been
  identified, the next step for a company is to
  associate business goals for each audience.
• For example, should it cross-sell and up-sell to
  existing customers? Build new revenue sources
  from certain prospects? Or assist the sales
  organization with better competitive intelligence?

17

• By leveraging knowledge about viewer behavior and
  organization, content creators can immediately
  take advantage of flexible business rules that
  determine the most effective way to
• deliver a certain set of information.
• Web sites can take advantage of these rules by
  dynamically tailoring navigation, content
  displays and application programs to channel
  individual users towards the business results
  that are desired.

18
Unified Management
19
Web Content

• This content asset concept addresses all
  attributes of Web content, including
• The information itself -- for example, the text
  of a press release, the data included in a
  product specification.
• The presentation -- that is, how the content
  should appear on the site, the visual style
  requirements, the graphical look and feel of the
  Web site?
• The viewing rules -- how this content looks
  different to different audiences for example,
  should prospects and existing customers view
  different versions of the product overview page?
• The editing rules -- what is involved in creating
  this content, who has the authority to put it
  into the site, and what workflow process will be
  followed to approve and publish it
• By taking this life-cycle view of content assets,
  the entire management process is obvious to all
  involved parties and increases the value of the
  information.

20
Implement non-technical content management

• The key to eliminating bottlenecks and improving
  information quality is empowering business
• people to create and modify the content for
  which they are responsible. This is most
  effectively
• accomplished by enabling different content
  contributors to use their tools of choice for
  creating that content.

21
2. Automate costly, time-consuming processes

• A content management system should make managing
  Web content simpler, not more complex, and
  provide a unified environment for managing
  multiple types of content. It should also support
  non-technical business people in the creation and
  development of content, as well as in the
  application of business rules.

22

• A content management system should make managing
  Web content simpler, not more complex,and provide
  a unified environment for managing multiple types
  of content. It should also support non-technical
  business people in the creation and development
  of content, as well as in the application of
  business rules.

23
Important Slide

• A PR manager should be able to manage press
  releases, for example, but cannot add position
  papers or similar content to the site without
  involving Webmasters or designers to create
  templates and navigation hooks -- and suffering
  the delays such projects impose.u

24

• An effective content management system should
  significantly reduce the technical skill set
  people need to develop templates that implement
  new types of content.
• The benefits include better time-to-market,
  faster response to change, and greater access to
  resources within the organization.

25
Business Rules

• Business rules are subject to similar
  requirements. Just as time-to-market can be
  negatively impacted when template creation
  becomes a technical process, the quality of the
  Web site can be affected when business rule and
  work flow management can't rapidly respond to
  change.
• The content management system should put
  management of the business rules -- access,
  creation and editing rights, approval -- within
  the reach of the business user.

26
Harmonize management of template-driven and ad
hoc content

• As content management systems have grown, most
  Web sites of significant size have become a mix
  of manually created and template-driven content.
  For many organizations, this has resulted in a
  mixture of inconsistent tools and multiple
  management processes.

27

• Many companies have found themselves in a
  situation where each type of content goes through
  its own separate workflow process. This also runs
  counter to the ideal of leveraging current skills
  and lowering the costs of content management.

28

• Unified management makes for a more consistent
  Web site, with all content moving through the
  same work processes and approvals, and accessible
  through a single, consistent set of business
  rules.

29
Use metadata to automate management and
measurement

• Metadata is the information about information
  within a site. Examples of metadata include the
• author of a piece of content, its creation
  date, its access control properties, the category
  the content is classified in, or a even a
  functional description of a page.
• Once metadata is associated with a particular
  type of content, it can be leveraged as a
  powerful management tool to generate automated
  directories and listings of content, assist in
  site measurement, or drive the dynamic behavior
  of the site.

30
Metadata

• Metadata can be used to automate many parts of
• managing a site. For example, many sites
  feature a directory page that lists press
  releases,which must be updated every time a new
  release is added.
• If a press release is removed from the site,
  someone must also remember to delete it from the
  directory, or it results in a broken link.
• The problem is multiplied further if there are
  multiple directories or methods of linking to
  press releases within the Web site.

31
(No Transcript)
32
3. Leverage existing assets and skills

• Companies need to take advantage of knowledge
  that already exists within their organization and
• build toward corporate goals. At its
  simplest, this means letting people apply tools
  whether they are programming languages or word
  processors and existing knowledge to the tasks
  of managing Web content. It also means
  integrating with other corporate systems to
  facilitate the re-use and exchange of information
  that can be found in those systems.

33
Support quality, brand consistency, and corporate
standards

• A content management system should make a major
  contribution to the quality of a Web site. The
  visual consistency provided by templates and the
  reuse of design elements has obvious benefits for
• enforcing a site's design and branding
  standards.