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About Us > About | News | Strategy |
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Oct 01, 2001
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The Champlain Business Journal recently published an article written by Scully Interactive owner, Russ Scully, on the topic of Web-based content management.
The article follows in its entirety...
Web site development is on a fast track. No Web developer will argue with that statement. The technologies surrounding interface design and server side programming are largely responsible for driving the rapid advances in the industry.
The first years of Web development saw Web sites driven primarily by static HTML pages that contained hyperlinks to more static pages. Browser software was greatly limited by the initial set of HTML tags available and server-side programming efforts were sparse and poorly integrated with the user interface design. Today more and more sites are seeing the advantages of a database driven approach where content is stored in a back end database then pushed through HTML templates to generate Web pages on the fly. The difference between each approach is in the nature of the content – static versus dynamic. Both development approaches yield the same result, but one offers administrative advantages that the other doesn’t. Before we can get into the advantages of one approach over the other, we’ll need to cover a basic understanding of what each one means.
First of all, in the context of Web development, content consists of the informational attributes of a Web page and is generally the reason the Web user is visiting your site. The information on your site may consist of an organizational background and service offering description in the case of a brochure site or of product specifics and purchasing mechanisms on your e-commerce site. Regardless, the content is delivered using a combination of text, images, sound, video, and animation. These multimedia attributes are what separate the Web from traditional publishing mediums.
Static content is the content that resides within an HTML page before the page is sent to the browser. These pages are considered stand-alone and do not necessarily require a Web server to publish.
Dynamic content is content that is served by a source outside of the HTML page and called to action only after an HTTP request is made. These outside sources are generally made up of external files residing on the Web server or Web accessible databases.
There is one enormous advantage that initially comes to mind when deciding on a static versus dynamic approach to your Web site – content management. Content management enables a Web administrator to effectively control the content of a Web site without the dependency of a Web developer to provide the changes for them. Content management sites also provide a view into any user input captured from your site that is stored in the back end database.
There are many content management solutions available both off-the-shelf and custom created for a particular site. The focus of this article will not be to provide a competitive analysis of those solutions (a simple search on the Web will generate enough results to get you started down that road), but to address the generic advantages of any content management solution for a database driven Web site.
The most effective content management solution is one that uses a back end database to store the content served to and gathered from a site using a Web interface to provide accessibility to the data. The Web interface is essentially a secure Web site that connects to your Web site database and has add, modify, and delete privileges over the data inside. The key word in that statement is secure. It sounds scary that something so powerful as a content management tool can also be just as swift in destroying the content you’ve worked so hard to produce. Not to mention the damage that can be done by a competitor or disgruntled employee who finds his way into your administration site. However, these issues are not much of a concern when security measures are put in place to assure that accessibility is only available to authorized administrators.
Content management tools are largely Web based. This means that access to the content management functionality inherent in the tools is dependent only on an internet connection, a browser, and a login. A content administrator does not need to have any knowledge of HTML authoring or of file transfer protocol (FTP) to administer the site. This greatly reduces the risk of formatting inconsistencies in your pages caused by erroneous HTML and broken links caused by uploading a document to the wrong directory on the Web server. Also, keep in mind that the Web is practically ubiquitous so the administration site is always accessible regardless of what software may be resident on the computer it is accessed from (outside of a browser of course). This means that content updates and changes can be made from almost anywhere freeing the administrator from the actual Web site files and any Web development software.
From an administration perspective, a content management tool is a necessity when your site begins to grow beyond 20 or so pages. Database driven sites have the ability to grow exponentially with the use of HTML templates and database queries. Consider the press release section of your Web site where each press release contains similar attributes. Each one has a title, a release date, an author, a contact, and the text of the release which make up a single record in your database. An HTML template controls the page layout of each element in the press release and knows where to position each one. When a user makes a request for a specific press release, that record is delivered by the database then pushed through the HTML template to produce the page that is displayed by the browser. By simply creating additional records in your database you’ve in effect added another page to your site.
A content management tool allows a Web site administrator to create, edit, and delete pages of content without any knowledge of HTML authoring. Instead, the administrator logins into their administration Web site, navigates to the pages that control the section they wish to administer and through the use of HTML forms can manage their Web site content. Changes that are made on the administration Web site immediately affect the data in the Web site database when the form is submitted. Workflow management procedures can be designed into the administration site to allow for content approval by any number of parties before database changes go live. This process of approving content after it is inserted into the database allows content reviewers to proof the content prior to making it public. It also touches on another advantage to content management tools which is role based privileges.
Content management tools require a login to access the Web site data. Based on that login, the administration site can determine the level of access the administrator is granted over the Web site data. Content management tools support multiple groups of administrators within an organization which means that administrative duties can be assigned to different groups based on the relativity and sensitivity of the content. What seemed like an overwhelming task for a single group of administrators can now be distributed across multiple departments each responsible for their own content with a governing body of quality assurance people to approve the content.
Web sites that can benefit the most from a content management tool are sites whose content changes on a frequent basis or sites that generate high levels of user input. We already understand that a content administrator can manage the content displayed on a site by means of the administration Web site. The direction of data travel we have not considered is from the user to the database. Consider an e-commerce site. An e-commerce site may have a catalog of products for sale and each product possess the same attributes - similar to our press release example. Each product may have a SKU, a description, a list of style attributes, some specifics, a retail price, a wholesale price, an inventory count, etc. What happens when a customer places an order for a product on our e-commerce site?
This is a complicated question and one that cannot be answered without considering all of the business rules and downstream processes of an organization’s fulfillment process. The planning stage of any Web development project is a critical piece of time where these kinds of questions are addressed. Regardless of the process, one thing is for sure, we need to store the product order for this customer into the Web site database so that we have a record of the purchase. The administration site will give the product fulfillment group a view of the pending orders to fill along with all the customer related information needed to process and ship the order. This is another example where role based privileges in the administration site can distribute the content administration duties to the appropriate parties. The administration site can also be designed to connect to additional databases such as product inventory so that when an order is shipped, the change in inventory is recorded and automatically updated on the Web site.
Web based content administration can certainly be beneficial to Web site owners supporting a single database driven site. But what if you need to support multiple sites that share a combination of common and unique content? This scenario is a slightly more complex arrangement, but the fundamentals still apply. With a centralized data model and a hosting arrangement that supports access to a common database from multiple sites, an administration site can be designed to support the needs of each site and the needs of the governing content provider. A shared administration site can support unique logins for administrators of each of the child sites allowing them to manage their own content. An additional login can be used by the governing content provider to manage the content that is common to all of the child sites in the overall network. As the network grows, the value that each child site brings to the content pool can be felt across the entire family of sites.
No matter how many sites you wish to support the underlying question any Web site owner should ask themselves is, "Do I intend to administer my own content updates, or am I content with going to my Web developer each time I need to make a change?" In the case where your Web site receives a significant amount of user input, you will need some kind of system to manage that data and to take action on it if necessary. Emailing user information to a designated address is not always a viable solution when that information needs to be shared across multiple parties. Emails are also harder to track, sort, and draw metrics from when it comes time to inventory the responses you’ve received from your site.
Content management solutions enable web site owners to take control over the content of their site and to interact with the site’s day to day dynamics. The end result is fresher content and more efficient administration that can be customized to the needs of your organization. |
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| Oct 01, 2001 | > | Scully Published in Champlain Business Journal |
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