At NLC we have had the opportunity to work with a range of Web Content Management (WCM) products. While each product has its own unique take on how to structure and store content, they all require a clear strategy and implementation plan to arrive at a level of structure or content granularity that is appropriate for the organization.
To explain the concept of content granularity, consider as an example, a news releases from the NLC website.
| non-linear creations to share best practices in CMS, SEO and MOSS 2007 at the Gilbane Conference in Washington, D.C.
non-linear creations scheduled to speak about content management, search engine optimization and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007TM at the Gilbane Conference in Washington, D.C., June 5-6, 2007 Ottawa, ON - Monday, June 04, 2007 - non-linear creations (NLC), a leading e-business integrator with extensive experience in content management, is pleased to conduct two discussion sessions at this year’s Gilbane Conference on Content Technologies in Washington, D.C. Participating in a panel discussion on June 5, 2007 at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, Randy Woods, executive vice president and author of a number of non-linear creations whitepapers, will shed some light on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007TM (MOSS 2007) by sharing lessons learned from NLC’s recent MOSS projects at Everything you wanted to know about MOSS 2007 (but were afraid to ask). Randy will also discuss integrating search engine optimization best practices during content management system implementations at Best Practices in Integrating CMS and SEO on June 6, 2007. |
When one person views this news release they may describe this release as containing a title, short description and the full body of the news release. A more granular view would see this release containing a title, short description, location, date and the full text. When the WCMS is being configured this choice needs to be made. Does the WCMS store just three pieces of content for a news release, or does it store five?
So, why should I care about the level of granularity? When attempting to find that right level, consider the following cases where high granularity can be of benefit. Higher content granularity:
- Enforces consistency in content, resulting in a more professional feel to your website.
- Allows for greater reuse of content; both within the WCMS and with other (external) applications. For example; a new release with a clearly defined date field can be more easily shared a calendar of upcoming events.
- Simplifies complex presentation patterns and can enforce more consistent formatting. For example; the location and date of the news release are always and automatically bolded.
- Allows for better classification of content; which in turn can be used to provide additional information to search programs. For example; being able to search releases by date and location.
On the flip side, overly granular content can:
- Introduce extra complexity for content authors; they may be overwhelmed by the number of fields they have to fill in.
- Increase the effort required to migrate existing content to the WCMS. Existing content that is unstructured often needs to be reviewed and missing information filled in before it can be loaded into the WCMS.
In the next posting I’ll offer several best practices for content granularity.