When it comes to content management, the Webmaster’s lot is never a placid one. Whether it’s foraging for wayward, unnamed jpgs — and then working with IT to sift through old tape backups for those images — or attempting to hunt down the final version of press release from two quarters ago (and re-obtaining legal clearance), the realm of content always seems just short of anarchic. Brand managers identify broken links in their areas, then retain their own designers to remake that portion of the site — implementing a design that has nothing to do with the rest of the site’s navigation, tone or look and feel. And so it goes.

The fact is, these scenarios play themselves out in organization after organization, day after day. The pain is palpable, the responsibilities diffuse, and the costs ­ human, organizational and, most of all, financial ­ all too real. The good news is that there’s nothing inevitable about content management meltdowns. The disconnect arises from valuing content but failing to understand the infrastructure and technology issues that support its timely development, presentation and publication.

A combination of good process decisions and strong software to support and automate parts of the process can save even mid-sized companies thousands of dollars a day. The antidote to this turmoil lies in awareness of the potential choke points in content management:

Style Guides. Style Guides and Style Sheets ensure online brand integrity. Agencies use style guides to define how the brand is to be treated online, including audiences, tone of address, color palette and logo use rules. For web sites, style guides can be reinforced site-wide by style sheet files. Top tier web development and content management applications help enforce style sheets.

Work Flow Process. Smart companies create a standard workflow, with predictable turnaround times. Moving to an online system yields greater efficiency, and can add built-in version tracking, source control, and access control.

Link & Spell Checking. Errors happen, and there are times when they seem to multiply of their own accord. Fortunately, link checkers can be installed on Web servers. Indeed, most standard Web authoring and content management applications now have spell checking and link checking built in.

Asset Management Process/System. Asset management is the process by which a company stores and catalogs its digital assets. While file-server based asset management is popular, it often leaves companies with unresolved version and source control issues. As the number of assets and complexity of their interrelationships grows, file server-based systems break down quickly. Asset management systems allow for metadata — data associated with a specific file — to be attached to every version of every asset, to provide search, access control, and source control across a large and growing set of files.

Data Security. When implementing data security, options abound – but not all options are created equal. Even well managed archived backups of a live site or file system don’t provide versioning and rollback capabilities (the ability to simply "restore" a Web site or document archive to a previous version) which are available in higher end content management applications


As with many business problems, applications exist to solve some or all of these issues. That said, it takes a commitment to the solution — involving all those who will contribute to the site or asset archive as well as those who use the system to run the business — for the solution to work. And, of course, the solution has to be sufficiently cost-effective so that it pays for itself over time.

When these conditions are met, valued content begins to receive the treatment it so richly deserves.

Jim Howard, CEO of CrownPeak Technology, has helped pioneer cutting-edge content management solutions since 1995, for such companies as, 20th Century Fox, The Hollywood Reporter, Amgen, NBC.com and The Academy Awards¨. Based in Marina del Rey, Calif., CrownPeak is the first company to provide world-class content and asset management as a service, so that secure, feature-rich, enterprise level technology can be made available economically. CrownPeak Technology, Inc. www.crownpeak.com