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Web Content ManagementWeb Content Management
Jian Qin,Syracuse UniversityIntroduction 687
Web Content Life Cycle 687
Content Creation and Authoring 688
Content Design 688
Version Control and Collaborative Authoring 689
Document Management Systems 690
Content Representation and Organization 690
Metadata Schemes 691
Controlled Vocabularies 692
Encoding of Metadata and Taxonomies 693
Content Transformation 693Issues in Content Management 695
Content Requirements 695
Technical Requirements 695
Access Control 695
Economic and Legal Aspects 695
Security 695
Trends 696
Glossary 696
Cross References 697
References 697INTRODUCTION
Web content management is a process in which con-
tent management solutions are used to create, store, pub-
lish, update, and repurpose content to be communicated
through an organization’s Web site. The content may ap-
pear in the form of HTML, XML, image, audio/video,
plain text, or database. The management of these assets
is achieved through using templates, workflow tracking
features, publishing systems, and storage of content ob-
jects in database or file indexing systems. Web content
is rapidly becoming one of the primary components of
the competitive advantage for all types of organizations.
Whether an organization’s Web site can attract and retain
users plays an important role in an organization’s suc-
cess, especially for e-businesses. The increasing impor-
tance of Web content demands better and more respon-
sive methods and technologies that produce and provide
access to it.
Web pages of the early days were created mainly
through manual HTML coding and the content contained
in these pages was static. As the number and types of files
composing a Web site grew rapidly, manual coding and
linking became time-consuming and error-prone. The sit-
uation could worsen when more than one person worked
on the same Web project. The need for effective and dy-
namic publication of data and link creation on the Web
prompted a new generation of the Web. The early dynamic
generations of Web content primarily used programming
interfaces and languages such as the common gateway
interface (CGI) and Perl. Later, other programming lan-
guages, e.g. VBScript, JavaScript, and JavaServer Pages
(JSP), became popular. By using computer programs and
stylesheets, data stored in databases could be browsed or
retrieved and displayed on the fly in a predefined style.
Although dynamic presentation of data on the Web was
accomplished by utilizing information technology, new
challenges emerged. One such challenge was version con-
trol. In the case of a large team working on a Web site
that contains hundreds or thousands of files, poor coor-
dination and lack of version control can cause unneces-
sary damages to the work being done. Another problem isthe workflow management. As maintaining a Web site be-
comes part of the daily life of an organization, tasks such
as creating, editing, testing, approving, and publishing
will involve many people at different levels and in different
specialization areas. A lack of rules and procedures can
create bottlenecks or blockages of the workflow. These two
example problems demonstrate that creating and main-
taining a Web site, particularly a large one, is no longer
a simple matter of assembling a group of HTML pages
and programs. More sophisticated systems are required
for the production and delivery of Web content. These
systems are expected to solve problems such as content
creation, representation and organization, asset manage-
ment, access management, production content delivery,
version control, and scheduling.
Web content management becomes the term referring
to a system that performs all these tasks, as well as the
practice that uses the system to produce, deliver, and man-
age Web content. It is therefore used to mean both pro-
cesses and the technology involved. This chapter will dis-
cuss Web content management primarily following the
processes from content creation to delivery. Key technolo-
gies will be mentioned when necessary, but vendors for
particular products will not since they are not the focus
of this chapter.WEB CONTENT LIFE CYCLE
Components in a Web content life cycle are given dif-
ferent names depending on how developers view and
build the content management system. Latham (2002)
proposes a six-phase life cycle for more general content
management. They are creation/acquisition, review, ag-
gregation/management, distribution, archiving, and de-
struction, all in the context of workflow and integration.
IBM defines a Web content life cycle as having four major
elements: content creation, content management, con-
tent access management, and production content deliv-
ery (IBM, 2002a). Content-wire.com (http://www.content-
wire.com) includes 11 columns in a content life cycle:
accessibility and usability, audiovisual, billing, content687