The Elements of Content Strategy - Erin Kissane [15]
Content management
You know how websites all used to be made of individual, hard-coded HTML pages? That sucked.
If you weren’t around for that part of the web, think of it as the scribes-in-monasteries period of web history during which all written human knowledge was hand-copied by very pale guys with poor eyesight. The invention of the web has been compared to Gutenberg’s introduction of movable type, and for good reason—but on the web content side, our communication revolution really took place when software developers brought the database-and-display-template systems of the old offline computing world onto the web in the form of content management systems.
The first major content management systems were the lumbering and expensive descendents of old-school document-management systems. So corporate and institutional content managers (mostly known as “webmasters” at that point) were the first ones to break out into the daylight of content management. All the content that had been tortured into blocks of HTML was suddenly given a home in a database, which meant that “revising the boilerplate” suddenly meant making copy changes in one or two places, instead of five or ten. Site redesigns began to seem just hard instead of utterly impossible.
Eventually, both blogging software and open-source content management systems emerged, and while the former got more sophisticated, the latter got easier and easier to use until the two were indistinguishable. Anyone with basic computer skills could publish content online, and major online publishers could do their work more efficiently and for less money.
As of 2010, WordPress, the most popular blogging-application-turned-CMS, has nearly 30 million users worldwide and powers approximately 12% of all websites (http://bkaprt.com/cs/10/).14
But this isn’t a story about software. Since they first appeared, content management systems have looked to many companies like a way to buy and automate editorial processes that actually require a lot of time from skilled, paid human beings. People who manage content do routinely use content management systems, but they also frequently:
Develop CMS requirements
Define information workflows
Deal with version control
Manage the preservation of information (archiving and backup)
Implement and optimize site-search tools and processes
Define and maintain taxonomies, tagging systems, and metadata
Most content management on the web happens under the guise of another role. Some people who do content management are web editors. Others are information architects, user experience generalists, webmasters, community moderators, or all-around IT staff members. On the other hand, there’s also an entire professional field—digital curation—complete with academic and professional journals, curricula, and PhD programs, that deals exclusively with the preservation and retrieval of content.
Cross-training
In addition to being descended from other fields, content work can never be fully extricated from the sibling disciplines that surround it. Content strategists need to understand enough about visual design to know when content is being presented in a way that is attractive and easy to read; they need to know enough about accessibility to plan for making content available on a wide range of devices and to users with disabilities and special access requirements; they need to know enough