content management 101
DESCRIPTION
Presentation given at the CASE Communications, Marketing & Technology Conference in Boston on April 16, 2009. Before you shop for a CMS or redesign your website, you need to understand the basics of content management in higher education. This non-technical session will help you understand how to free your content from the page so it can be re-used, re-purposed and re-packaged in countless ways. You'll leave with a new way of thinking and a vision for a more dynamic, consistent and serendipitous website experience.TRANSCRIPT
Content Management 101
J. Todd BennettManaging Partner
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Remember this?
The evolution of the college website
The evolution of the college website
How do we try to fix it?
GET A CMS!
Reasons you get a CMS
• Ease the burden- more people lending a hand!
• WYSIWYG• Easier updates, design changes• More consistency and control • Do cool stuff without knowing what
you’re doing
Beware of features
Be careful with change
No CMS will fix problems with
your people or process
Dining Services
StudentAffairs
Math
Registrar
English
MaintenanceMaintenance
How do we harness their expertise for everyone’s
benefit?
It’s time to rethink how we create and publish content.
www.flickr.com/photos/austin2179/
The long neck and tail
Zipf Distributionwww.useit.com/alertbox/zipf.html
Page views
Content
Freeing content
BiosBios
VideosVideosImagesImages
StoriesStories
StatsStats
NewsNews
EventsEvents
Projects
Projects
Platform for interacting with content
Content Reuse: the possibilities
There are over 2000 different Lego parts in 55 colors and
over 20 materials
Content Reuse: the possibilities
Just 6 (2x4) bricks of the same color
combine in 915,000,000 unique
ways
Content Reuse
A single piece of content is created once and used in
multiple formats and contexts
The 3 Rs of Content Reuse
Re-use
1 piece of content, multiple contexts
Re-purposeuse parts of a piece of content for different purposes
Re-package
multiple documents created in multiple media types
Benefits of Reuse
•Quick and Easy Updates•Consistency•Knowledge Repository•Extended Reach•Do more with less
(personalization)
Content Reuse: Cautions
• Context reduces re-usability• Lack of context requires branding
of the content itself• Decentralization requires
consistency in structure, taxonomy, and tagging
What is Structured Content?
• A way of separating content from presentation
• A way of creating & storing information based on a predefined set of rules
• Content that can be parsed and formatted into just about any other structured (or unstructured) format
What is the alternative?
Unstructured Content
• Traditional HTML• Static, freeform• WYSIWYG
Unstructured content is usually the result of an unstructured
production process
Problems with unstructured content
• Difficult to make site-wide changes to content or layout
• Redundancies, inconsistencies, erroneous info
• Presentation often coupled with content
• Difficult to re-use content
Content is the sum of its parts
What parts does your content have?
When structuring your content
• Remember the 3 Rs• Think beyond your singular
purpose • How granular should your content
be?• How will others find this content?
Use of Metadata
Information used to describe & categorize content
Album namesArtistsSong TitlesAlbum ArtworkRatingsLast Played DateGenrePlaylists
Metadata
• Structured/controlled metadata– Categories & Relationships– Content Fields in the Structure
• Unstructured/ free form metadata– Tags– Ratings– Usage Data
Making it happen
• Start small• Eliminate the fear of the technology• Introduce new tools only after you
have developed a culture of content contribution
