Editorial Articles

The content of most websites is input by web editors using Content Management Systems (CMS). The development of CMS over the past 10 years has been driven by the desire and necessity to take the control of web editing and content updating away from developers and place it in the hands of editors. To achieve this CMS need high levels of usability without the need for HTML or web coding skills. This move enabled websites to be regularly updated by the right people: ‘content provided by the right people at the right time’.

However, good web content management now goes beyond this starting point. Content management is now about work flows, providing the right content to the right people at the right time, managing content created by users, organising content and multi-purposing content.

The technology and the thinking has kept pace. True content management should involve some control over editorial processes, and even the simplest CMS should enable work flow. For example, authors may be able to write content into a web CMS but approval for publishing to the web, or any other output, is held by editors with the system controlling this work flow. More complex CMS will facilitate co-authorship, peer appraisal and version control. Editorial control is increasingly important with the rise in user created content, and is well exemplified by the BBC website. The editorial control and content management, if the CMS is technically able, may be devolved almost entirely to the users as is the case with social network sites like You Tube and Facebook.

Good content management is supplying the right content to the right people. Obviously a proportion of this equation is supplied by good traditional editorial control but this needs to be enabled by the web technology. By inviting an individual to register with a site, or join a site, and provide some information about themselves and register interests and preferences good content management systems will supply them with the information that they are interested in each time they sign in. This may the members of a professional association who once they login to their association website are presented with, and only with, the information that relates to their area of interest and professional involvement, this may be web pages, documents, conferences, publications or events. Commercially there are some excellent examples of this type of focused content delivery ranging from the Telegraph online, to Amazon and Google. To achieve this level of focused content delivery all content put into the system must be managed, for example it may need to be ‘tagged’ in a variety of ways either by a ‘taxonomy functionality’ and/or by permissions. Permissions may be used to ‘restricted’ content delivery to only certain groups or individuals whose login profiles match the permission of the content.

There has been a shift over recent years from publishing in print to publishing online, at the same time there has been ‘merging’ of media with same content published both in print and online. Advanced content management should allow true management of content. Content should only be created once regardless of the eventual media of that content. An author should be able to write their content into a system which the editor can then use to manage that content into a variety of different media, so one piece of content can be directed to web and print publishing with only one input of that content. This creates an efficient content creation – editing – publishing process. However, this goes beyond simply print and text formats. Web content may now be audio and visual and the same principles of ‘single’ content apply. The BBC i-Player has brought content from terrestrial television to web delivery.

Author: Peter Jackson, Operations Director e-mango Ltd