The Internet Encyclopedia (Volume 3)

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688 WEBCONTENTMANAGEMENT

Import

Filter

Convert

Parse

Content

deployment

Content

management

Content

creation

Browse

Search

Create new content

Export

Publish

Transformation

Web

WAP

Email

Catalog

Portals

Data in

databases

Author input

Legacy data

...

Asset management

Document classification

Interlinking

Questions and answers

...

Figure 1: Web content life cycle.

delivery, content management, creation, digital copyright,

syndication, taxonomies, unwired, and vertical content.

No matter how content management systems and prac-

tices vary, Web content must go through the processes of

creation, management, and deployment (Figure 1). Con-

tent creation includes new content creation and existing

content conversion such as data from databases and/or

legacy content. Content management embraces many as-

pects such as

(1) asset management, i.e., managing all pictures and files

to avoid data redundancies and easily handle media

files;

(2) access management, which integrates user manage-

ment and the permission systems;

(3) template management, which involves using dynamic

page rendering mechanisms to allow a uniform pre-

sentation of content; and

(4) content representation and organization, which gen-

erates metadata and structured content.

Content deployment is the transfer of Web assets from

the staging server to the production server. Current tech-

nology allows content on the production server to be

broadcast not only to an organization’s Web site, but

also on other application devices. Because Web content

is structured and organized in a way that can be reused,

the system can render the same content into a variety of

formats such as Web pages, wireless hand-held devices,

e-mails, and catalogs, besides desktop browsers. Such

content should also provide easier but more powerful

browse and search capabilities for the front-end users.

CONTENT CREATION

AND AUTHORING

Web content results from business processes such as plan-

ning, design, and implementation and falls into a num-

ber of large categories—depending on which criterion is

used to categorize the content. For example, commonly

seen content types include information on products, pro-

cedures and guidelines, reports from research or devel-

opment projects or business transactions, presentations,

and white papers to the public. While these content types

serve different purposes in business processes, their cre-

ators may work at various positions (e.g., managers, pro-

grammers, graphic designers, technical writers) and have

different levels of technology skills. Besides using good

content authoring tools to leverage computer skill differ-

ences, it is also necessary to have predefined templates and

procedures in place for content creators to follow. Content

creation and authoring includes design, version control,

collaborative authoring, and document management.

These components work together to provide an infrastruc-

ture on which Web site functions and services are built.

Content Design

The general principles for content creation are to keep

documents small, to build a modular system, to reuse con-

tent and definitions as much as possible, and to create

powerful metadata (Gabriel, 2001). The size of display ar-

eas is limited on computer screens and smaller devices.

Keeping documents small increases the displaying flexi-

bility, but more importantly, smaller documents and doc-

ument components increase the chance for them to be

restructured and reused. It also makes it easier to frame

the smaller documents into new technologies such as the

extensible markup language (XML) (W3C, 2000). The sec-

ond principle of modularization has been used success-

fully in building business and information systems. For

large Web sites, modularizing means dividing Web con-

tent into modular systems based on certain criteria, e.g.,

by functional unit. A large site may have modules for re-

search and development, customer service, and sales and

marketing. Although different types of documents and

content often bear different elements and structure, it is

also quite common that some of them share the same def-

initions. An example would be news releases—each func-

tional unit’s Web site has a news section. Therefore, the

document definition for news articles can be defined once

and reused in all units’ Web sites. Content and document

definition reuse can save not only time and effort but

also keep similar content in a consistent format. Meta-

data is information about data and documents. Title, au-

thor, key words, abstract, and content category are the

most common elements for document type of content. For

database content, metadata includes, among other things,

table name, field name, and data type. Metadata contains

elements underpinning the functions of browsing, search-

ing, and displaying.

When designing Web content, one needs to consider

both its internal and external structures. The internal

structure refers to the organization and arrangement of

content components. For example, an online technical

manual may be structured as chapters, sections, and para-

graphs; within each of the paragraphs there may be still

or interactive illustrations with text annotation. An impor-

tant design feature for such an online manual would be

that no matter where users are inside the manual, there

would be navigational indictors for them to move back

and forth or up and down, even jump from one place

to another. Another example is the navigation system

within a Web site, which enables “relational” browsing

and searching; i.e., similar products, technical support,

and promotional plans pertaining to a particular product

are related to that product’s description. The role of in-

ternal structure design is to define Web content types and