Are You Publishing Too Much On Your Website?

Many websites are still publishing content that is not core to their business. The justification is that such content will indirectly deliver benefit. This is not a good idea. Focus on the content that is directly applicable to your organization’s objectives. Any other content confuses. It wastes time and money.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2004). Articles>Web Design>Content Management

Avoid Santa Claus Approach to Content Management

The Santa Claus approach to content management creates a content management software wish list. It believes in the magic of technology to sweep away any and every problem. Typically, those who believe in Santa don't believe in defining their processes, or figuring out just why they need a website in the first place.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2004). Articles>Content Management>Web Design>Technology

Creating a Content Strategy for Your Website

People are looking for content to help them reach their goals, and you should start any site redevelopment by drawing up a content strategy designed to satisfy the user. We're currently doing this for a couple of our clients, and working through it ourselves now we've finally found the time to revamp our own presence (the cobbler's children and all that).

Moore, David. IQcontent (2003). Articles>Web Design>Content Management>Content Strategy

Doing a Content Inventory (Or, A Mind-Numbingly Detailed Odyssey Through Your Web Site)

A content inventory is a relatively straightforward process of clicking through your Web site and recording what you find. We’ve developed a simple Excel spreadsheet to help you structure your findings, and some tips on how to get through it.

Veen, Jeffrey. Adaptive Path (2002). Articles>Web Design>Content Management

Do You Manage a Website or a Warehouse?

There are two types of people involved in websites today: those who see content as an asset, and those who see it as a commodity. The latter better start looking for a new career.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2004). Articles>Web Design>Content Management

Measuring Your Web Publishing Processes

What's really important to measure for your website? Firstly, you need to measure how successful you are at creating, editing and publishing content. These are your web content management processes. Secondly, you need to measure reader behavior. There will also be some core website performance issues to measure. This week, I'd like to examine key web content management process measurables.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2003). Articles>Web Design>Content Management

Quality Publishing is About Saying No

Are the people who have least to say in your organization publishing most on your intranet or public website? Are the people who have most to say publishing least? You're not alone. Organizations are slowly realizing that managing a website is as much about what you don't publish as what you do.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2003). Articles>Content Management>Web Design

Should You Centralize or Decentralize Your Publishing?

Large websites often struggle to develop an efficient and cost-effective publishing model. Centralizing publishing ensures a consistent quality of what is published, but is often slow and frustrating. Decentralized publishing is faster and often more cost-effective, but can result in inconsistent quality, unless rigorous publishing standards are adhered to.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2003). Articles>Content Management>Web Design

Taking a Content Inventory

You take a content inventory because, before redesigning a website or intranet, you need to know what you have. This is especially important if you will be migrating your content to a new structure or new CMS - at some point you need to know every single content element.

Spenser, Donna. DonnaM (2006). Articles>Content Management>Web Design

Why Personalization Hasn't Worked

Personalization hasn't worked because most people don't have a compelling reason to personalize. It hasn't worked because the cost of doing it well usually significantly outweighs the benefits it delivers. It hasn't worked because managers have seen it as some Holy Grail of content management.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2003). Articles>Content Management>Web Design>Personalization

You Need a Five-Year Plan for Your Website

Websites change the way an organization communicates with its staff, customers, investors and general public. A change in communication is a major shift for the organization. To effectively implement such a change will take time. You need a five-year plan for your website.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2003). Articles>Web Design>Planning>Project Management

Twenty Signs You Don’t Want that Web Design Project

Most clients are good clients, and some clients are great clients. But some jobs are just never going to work out well. Herewith, a few indicators that a project may be headed to the toilet.

Zeldman, Jeffrey. Zeldman.com (2008). Articles>Web Design>Project Management>Planning

Setting Priorities

Nearly every company I’ve worked with since becoming a web professional six years ago has lacked an efficient way to decide which things to do first. Put 10 people into a room for an hour, and they’ll surely come up with a wish list a mile long.

Fraser, Janice. Adaptive Path (2002). Articles>Web Design>Project Management>Collaboration

Social Publishing ≠ Social Networking - So What Is It?

John Willis recently published a post that equates social publishing with social networking. While the post is pretty good, and I agree with most of the points, I need to correct the bit about the definition of social publishing. It’s way more than social networking. Let me explain.

Whatcott, Jeff. At First Light (2008). Articles>Content Management>Web Design>Social Networking

Getting Real About Agile Design

Agile is here to stay. The economic difficulties of the past months have finally put waterfall out of its misery; now more than ever, long requirements phases and vaporous up-front documentation aren’t acceptable. Software must be visible and valuable from the start. For many designers, Agile is already a fact of life (and for those less accustomed, some recommended reading follows at the foot of this article). We are reaching the point where we must either acclimatize or risk being bypassed. The good news is that Agile does allow us to still do the things we hold dear—research, develop a vision, and test and improve our designs—we just need new techniques. Now is the time to get real, and prove design can adapt, if we want to stay relevant in these increasingly unreal times.

Bowles, Cennydd. List Apart, A (2008). Articles>Web Design>Agile>Project Management

Trends in Web Design Involving WordPress

This week I caught up with Debbie Campbell, a Colorado web designer and developer and the owner of Red Kite Creative, and asked her about the latest trends in web design. I’ve been following Debbie on Twitter for a while. This week she posted a few tweets about web design and WordPress, so I asked her to share a little more.

Johnson, Tom H. I'd Rather Be Writing (2009). Articles>Interviews>Content Management>Web Design

A Seven-Step Web Strategy to Save Your Business

Here's a 7 step strategic plan that should fit most small businesses. Naturally a good deal of hustle will be needed to implement this kind of plan while doing everything else you need to do to keep your business afloat. There are businesses that can help you implement this plan as well- wink, wink. But if you can dedicate the time and resources I have no doubt that you will see serious ROI. I have seen it in my business and with many of our clients.

Banner, Jeb. SmallBox (2009). Articles>Web Design>Management>Marketing

HTML No Longer Needed

Much in the same way that Microsoft Word and PageMaker made desktop publishing more widely available and eliminated the need for tagging to achieve formatting, blogs and wikis are doing the same for the web. You can use WordPress to create an entire web site without knowing or using HTML. Editme.com is providing web site services using wiki technologies. These tools help users publish content with less knowledge of the underlying tagging.

Answers for All (2009). Articles>Content Management>Web Design>HTML

The User Experience of Enterprise Software Matters: Part 1

There’s one area that I believe user experience has lagged behind: the enterprise software space. I can’t tell you how many frustratingly unusable enterprise Web applications I’ve encountered during my 12 plus years in corporate America. As important as the user experience of enterprise software is to a business’s success, why isn’t its assessment usually a factor in technology selection?

Sherman, Paul J. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Web Design>Content Management>User Experience

The User Experience of Enterprise Software Matters, Part 2: Strategic User Experience

In this column, I’ll provide a technology selection framework that can help enterprises better assess the usability and appropriateness of enterprise applications they’re considering purchasing, with the goal of ensuring their IT (Information Technology) investments deliver fully on their value propositions.

Sherman, Paul J. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Web Design>Content Management>User Experience

Combine JSONP and jQuery to Quickly Build Powerful Mashups

With the number of publicly offered Web service APIs, it's now much easier to get content from different Web sources and to build mashups—if you have access to the right APIs and tools. Discover how you can combine an obscure cross-domain call technique (JSONP) and a flexible JavaScript library (jQuery) to build powerful mashups surprisingly quickly.

Özses, Seda and Salih Ergül. IBM (2009). Articles>Web Design>Content Management>JavaScript

Control and Community: A Case Study of Enterprise Wiki Usage

There are a wide variety of uses for Wikis and a level of interest in using them that’s matched by an extensive range of Wiki software. Wikis introduce to the Internet a collaborative model that not only allows, but explicitly encourages, broad and open participation. The idea that anyone can contribute reflects an assumption that both content quantity and quality will arise out of the ‘wisdom of the crowd.’

Clarke, Matthew C. Boxes and Arrows (2009). Articles>Web Design>Content Management>Wikis

Web Governance with Teeth

Formal Web Governance is a way to mitigate risks and liabilities associated with large Web sites. Using a framework to develop and document Web-specific policies and standards creates a playbook by which an organization can manage its Web presence.

Pierpoint, Christine. WelchmanPierpoint (2009). Articles>Web Design>Management>Policies and Procedures

A Call to Action for Web Managers: Blow the Whistle

We still had a huge, unruly Web site. It just had different graphics, a better-named Web team and more people shoveling on content and applications. Finally, out of desperation, we decided to try a new-fangled thing called a Web content management system.

Welchman, Lisa. WelchmanPierpoint (2009). Articles>Web Design>Content Management>Case Studies

My Apache WebDAV/Windows Nightmare

The goal was to use Subversion (SVN) as a poor man's CMS, and take advantage of great PC-based editors like DreamWeaver (for HTML) and XMetaL (for DITA). Eventually, we could add pre-commit checks and utilities to give us some of the advanced functionality we'd really like--like link management and metadata change management--but in the meantime we could do everything manually to get by. All we had to do was install Subversion and enable the WebDAV interface in Apache. But many hurdles later, I'm exhausted from jumping over them. Every one requires me to look through 20 web pages in search of a solution, and each time I surmount one obstacle, it's only to find a new one standing in my way.

Sun Microsystems (2007). Articles>Web Design>Content Management>Case Studies