Why and how to break your website's content into pieces

by Hilary Marsh
President, Content Company
April 2005

We call them Web pages – and they look like pages, with a set of content displayed together in one browser window. However, thinking of a piece of Web content only as a page drastically limits the ways in which that content can be used, and reused.

Each time content is reused, it provides several benefits:

• reinforces a brand message
• increases its chance of being remembered
• ensures consistency of facts

If not a single page, what is content, then? Web content is actually the sum of several parts, and to be most effective, it should be captured and stored in a way that reflects its parts.

In a content management system (CMS), this means creating a template that breaks the content into its elements (headline, summary, body, byline, etc.). Once this is done, a table of contents Web page can be built that displays the headline and summary of a set of content, with links to the full body. If a word in the headline needs to change, it is changed once and that change appears everywhere on the site automatically.

A website will usually have a handful of kinds of content, and each content type will need different elements. For example, press releases have datelines, media contact names and boilerplate language at the end; newsletters have article headlines and summaries; and executive bios have photos and text.

There should be only one photo and one bio of an executive stored on the site, so if that information needs to be used elsewhere -- in a press release or speech announcement, for example, it does not have to be created from scratch. The information can be updated in one single place, and if anything changes, that change will appear everywhere it needs to. That reassuring consistency reduces both time and risk.

Part of creating a plan for using a CMS is identifying what kinds of content exist in your organization and breaking each content type into its individual elements.

Content Company specializes in helping organizations like yours identify their content so it can be used more effectively and strategically. If you are interested in talking to us about working with you, contact us at info@contentcompany.biz.

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