InformationWeek

The discipline of content management is rapidly evolving beyond simple content creation and editing to include Web development, deployment, and life-cycle management. The leading content-management systems on the market are rapidly adding features for Internet security, personalization, and integration with other key systems, such as database and target marketing platforms.

Large Web sites comprise thousands of pages of dynamic and static content, ranging from HTML pages to graphics files and database scripts. Obviously, there's no way a single Webmaster, or even a team of professionals, can manually manage this growing complexity.

Content-management systems let companies set up structured processes that significantly reduce the effort required to get content from inception to the Web site. In a sense, content-management systems are the operating systems for Web sites.

But only 10% of the Global 2000 use content-management systems, according to Gartner Group, a market research firm. This might explain why so many Web sites-both large and small-have broken links and obsolete or inaccurate content.

This can have a chilling effect on E-business. Visitors tend to lose patience quickly with a poorly performing Web site, and especially with out-of-date content. Content-management systems offer companies an easy way to make their sites more relevant, keep content up to date and accurate, and reduce the time required to get important content published.

There are four key areas to content management and eight steps to the content workflow. The first key area is content creation. This involves using an application such as Microsoft FrontPage or Adobe Acrobat to create Web content. The next area is submission and assembly. Once the content is created, it must be submitted for approval. If multiple users are creating content that will be shown together on the Web site or will be part of multipage presentation, the content must be assembled and edited to ensure a consistent look and feel.

The next key area is content publishing. This involves bringing content to the Web site in a standard format, preferably using templates that enforce design consistency. Another important area is the storage and management of large volumes of content. This is best accomplished using repositories that can store both quantitative and textual content.

Along with the four key areas are the eight specific steps involved in getting content from creation to a published state on a Web site. The content-management process begins with planning the Web site. This includes resolving capacity issues, making platform decisions, setting security standards, and assigning roles.

Next comes site design and layout. The layout and structure of the site will dictate how content consumers navigate through the site. The content is then developed and refined to production quality, and the material is then published to the Web site.