What you DON'T Know About Web Content Management
As digital content continues to grow at an exponential rate, organizations increasingly struggle with ways to affordably and efficiently create and manage content on the Web. Issues pertaining to content timeliness and quality, content duplication, content organization and content retrieval are challenges that continue to plague many organizations. Finding a solution that addresses these challenges is, for many, a top priority, and requires a closer look at today's available Web content management offerings.
Many people think that Web content management is just about putting easy to use authoring tools into the hands of content owners to empower them to quickly and easily publish content to the Web. Features like WYSIWYG editing, template-driven pages, workflow and approval processes and version history are attributes of any content management system that purports to break down the Webmaster "bottleneck" and create efficiency in the Web publishing process.
But the truth is, today's advanced Web content management systems (WCMS) have evolved into more robust solutions. They are delivering benefits and a level of functionality that's beyond what buyers have come to expect from early WCMS solutions. Advanced features like flexible metadata and taxonomy classification, dynamic content generation, content objects and content reuse are redefining content management, delivering greater value and introducing better efficiencies in how content is created, classified, organized, presented and retrieved.
Classify Your Content:Metadata & Taxonomy
The manner in which content is created, organized, presented and retrieved has a direct influence on how much value can be derived from the content. As the sheer volume of digital content continues to grow, managing it becomes increasingly problematic. To address this challenge, organizations must rely on metadata (information about information) as a powerful way to classify and identify content so that it can be presented and displayed in a timely, targeted and meaningful way for users. Effective use of metadata will enable an organization to significantly increase the findability, readability and usability of site content while also enhancing its overall value. Classification of content also affords the benefit of data discovery, which is often equally important to users. An excellent complement to metadata, taxonomy-based content classification provides a way to record relationships that exists between a collection of terms or subjects. When content is associated with one or more terms, it inherits the properties and relationships of those terms, thus reducing the time and expense involved with categorizing new content. Once you've efficiently categorized your content, you will be in a position to dynamically display and reuse it throughout your site.
Invigorate your Content:Dynamic Pages & Navigation
Web content is increasingly becoming dynamic as organizations strive to deliver more up-to-date and relevant content to site visitors. Managing changing or dynamic content has been and continues to be a daunting task. Today's WCMS's are stepping up to the challenge of maintaining content that is fluid in nature by offering tools that allow you to automatically generate, display and update content based on its categorization and metadata criteria. Through content scheduling, content repurposing, content expiration and personalization you can quickly and easily make site updates, increase user productivity and ensure that content is always timely, targeted and accessible to your audiences.
Extend the Value of Your Content:Content Objects & Content Reuse
The ability to structure content into reusable "content objects" and separate presentation from form, adds significantly to the value of content and offers several compelling benefits beyond the obvious of simplified publishing and increased user productivity. Content that is now structured can easily be reused and repurposed across a Web site, and/or syndicated and consumed in multiple formats (XML, RSS/Web Services) across disparate systems. This not only improves the quality, accuracy and consistency of content, but also greatly reduces Web content creation and maintenance costs.
Implementing a WCMS to empower users to quickly and easily manage their own content continues to offer significant benefits to organizations: reduced strain on Web and IT staff, more efficient staff utilization, reduced costs, and streamlined Web maintenance processes. However, there is much more to be gained. Metadata and taxonomy, dynamic content generation, content objects and content reuse offer organizations the ability to:
- More efficiently and affordably create and manage Web content;
- Repurpose and reuse content;
- Deliver timely, targeted and accessible content;
- Further reduce ongoing operational costs; and;
If your organization is considering an enterprise or Web content management system implementation, you'll want to be sure you know everything there is to know about today's available WCMS solutions. And, you'll want to make sure you arm yourself with the functionality to help you manage your content in the most efficient and cost-effective manner. A clear understanding of the benefits of today's advanced and next generation WCMS features will ensure you select a solution that's best aligned with your content management strategy.
Since 1993, PaperThin has helped organizations of all sizes to significantly reduce the time and expense involved in creating, updating and managing Web content. PaperThin's CommonSpot™ Content Server is a leading Web publishing and content management solution that excels at delivering feature-rich functionality at an affordable price. CommonSpot's unique out-of-the-box framework and flexible architecture offers rapid implementation, ease of use and powerful customization, integration and scalability capabilities. Organizations like Baptist Healthcare System, Cornell University, Marshall & Ilsley Corporation, Mayo Clinic, National Park Service, Sevin Rosen Funds, The Gillette Company, Voice of America and Wells Manufacturing depend on CommonSpot to efficiently and affordably manage their Web initiatives.
For more information about CommonSpot, call us at 800.940.3087, visit our Web site or email us at info@paperthin.com