Content Complete.

If you intend to publish content in a digital form, you better set some time aside to think about content maintenance. Even static (or “evergreen”) content will need maintenance from time to time. So let’s take a few moments now to think about the different ways you might choose to approach content maintenance for your project.

First, though, let’s clarify what we mean by “content maintenance”. For this discussion, I want to include all content maintenance tasks, so here’s what I mean: I mean all the work you do to improve, expand, or update the content AFTER it has been created (or acquired), adapted, imported into your content management system, and published for the first time. The first time around, during the “version 1″ phase, everybody tends to focus on all those initial steps, and rightly so. Often, little or no thought is given to ongoing content maintenance during the v1 timeframe. But if all goes well, you’re going to publish that v1 product and start thinking about v2, and then it’s going to hit you: “Hold on…what about all the existing content?”

Content maintenance tasks come in all shapes and sizes. At one end are individual content “bug fixes” related to simple grammar, spelling, and punctuation rules. At the other end are large-scale projects designed to keep the content up-to-date, to improve or expand the content, or to normalize the content for style. For instance, if you were publishing community profiles for a real estate or tourism website, it might be important to update population figures for all US cities and states once the new US Census figures are released. This is called a “currency” updated, intended to keep the content current. Since you need to update every single community profile, this could end up being a very large project. Meanwhile, your colleagues and customers have spotted a multitude of little errors here and there. Country names are inconsistent (United Kingdom, UK, U.K., Great Britain, England). Percent is “percent” sometimes and “%” others. “Abraham Lincoln National Park” is now called “Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site”. It’s possible to spend a lot of time chasing down these little content bugs, ignoring the big census project. Likewise, it’s possible to focus on the big census project and ignore all the bugs. Some of these individual bugs reveal problems that require large-scale survey/update operations (the country names and percent examples, for instance). What do you do? How do you spend your limited time? The answer is “It depends.” You need to develop a feel for the relative priority of the various content maintenance tasks you face. You need to accept that you will probably not be able to fix everything. Remember the SQRT analysis; you will need to apply it here.

So when you approach content maintenance, you have to realize that there are a lot of questions you’ll need to answer:

What will you update? Which content, and for what purposes? Which maintenance adds the most value, improving your audience’s experience the most?

How often will you review which content? Some content may require annual updating, some every four years, or monthly, or daily.

How will you keep track of your progress? How will you know what was done last, and by whom? How will you know when you should review that content again?

What sort of process will initiate a review? A schedule you maintain? Complaints from customers?

How will you do work? Who will do it, and what would make this work more efficient? Would you benefit from any special tools, macros, or database queries you don’t already possess?

If you are fortunate enough to work on a project that ends up lasting several years, content maintenance can easily become the largest line item in your organization’s budget. This can be a shock, especially since content maintenance received essentially 0% of your team’s resources back in v1!

In the coming weeks, I’ll add essays here describing content maintenance tracking, editorial “power tools” you might find helpful, what to do when you suspect content maintenance costs are outweighing the value of the content, how to “templatize” or “modularize” your content to facilitate maintenance, and other topics. In the famous words of Douglas Adams, “Don’t panic.” And good luck.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 10:51 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.