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You’ve worked hard on your web site redesign and launch. You posted hundreds of hours rewriting copy, met with your ad agency countless times to nail down the look and feel, and tackled obscure requirements from sales and customer support. You’ve worked so hard that no one on your staff can even stand to hear the word Web. You’re sick of thinking about it.

You slogged through all the tough times, and now the site is launched. Hooray! Time to party, blow off some steam, get some sleep, stop thinking about PDFs and HTML and webinars.

Fast forward to the week after launch. Now what?

What happens if the CFO needs to post revised quarterly numbers, and needs to do it at exactly 5:01pm on Tuesday? Can you guarantee publication of this information at that time?

What happens if you come back from lunch on a Thursday and discover that a well-meaning worker in another division decided to rewrite your home page copy for clarity? Did you have rules in place to keep him or her out?

What if the only person in your department that understands HTML goes on vacation for two weeks? Or gets a job somewhere else? Or gets sick? Does your web site grind to a halt until you can find somebody else to help you?

What if your most trusted channel partner needs to get access to sensitive documents on a recurring basis, and they want to do this via your web site? Can you easily add a secure place on your site to accommodate them? Or do you keep emailing and faxing dozens of documents daily because for now that’s so much easier?

In short, can your web site keep up with the business or is it just another pretty brochure created by a well-meaning designer? We have nothing against aesthetic appeal and visual design, but your company competes in the 21st century. You need beauty and brains to make it through.

Read about our capabilities and TopDog CMS, see if we can help you through your post-launch jam.

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What is database publishing? Is it the same as content management? File management? XML-aware publishing?

The short answer is “pretty much.”

Database publishing, as defined by Adobe, is this:

A process for managing, creating and publishing content through extensive use of database systems and content creation tools.

The basic idea behind database publishing is to store your data (price lists, articles, technical chapters, data sheets, or simple variables like name, address, occupation, etc) in a central repository, then push that data out onto a series of templates.

Some examples include:

• Reporting. Take a bunch of stored data fields and make sense of them to your audience. Opportunities for customized or personalized reports abound. For example, your VP of marketing may only want the top level numbers, but a marketing specialist figuring out better ways to handle event marketing would need more detail.
• Web site management. A CMS is simply an online database hooked up to an online templating system, with some kind of online management interface in between. It is database publishing through and through.
• On-demand printing. Lately there’s been a lot of talk about on-demand printing, particularly when combined with variable printing. Some examples:
  • Manufacturer with hundreds of products puts technical documentation into a central database, then allows users to visit their site and select which documents they want to have printed, either at a 24-hour printer or directly at their desktop. A more complex solution might involve grabbing only those sections they want and creating custom PDFs that can be printed at the user’s desktop, or combining different sections from different documents.
  • University system collects data on prospective students online, then takes this data to send them a fully customized prospectus. If the prospective student has an interest in music, physics and mathematics, emphasize this information and not the football games, poetry readings, and annual Greek Week.
  • Government agency collects information on various topics of interest to citizens, then categorizes this information. Citizens can log on and find information they need (such as phone numbers for a council member) or documents (such as the right form to fill out in order to register a DBA) or resources (the right place to call if you have sales tax questions), compile it into a custom PDF, and save it to their desktop. That way they can print this information out and keep it in a binder at their home or business.
  • Consumer-oriented company does all their business via direct marketing. They collect information on prospective clients (age, ethnicity, educational background, name, address, last 5 major purchases, etc) and prepares mailings using a straightforward cluster analysis. If, for example, they are sending out gym membership trial offers via postcard, there’s no need to send everyone the same post card with a big bodybuilder on the front. Perhaps professional women in their 30s would respond better if the image showed a fit young woman on a treadmill. Or maybe another mailing may improve if the company could co-brand the direct mail piece with the logo of the school the recipient attended. And let’s not forget that putting the recipient’s name front and center can increase response.
  • Wholesaling giant needs to track prices for all their SKUs on all its sales channels–retail operations, partner companies in Canada and Europe, direct mail catalog sales and more. Each SKU with price and other information is centrally stored in a database. A set of rules is applied to update all the channels on price changes and other edits made in the central database.

If most of this sounds similar to content management, it should. All we’re talking about here is the ability to centralize your data storage, then doing custom publishing of this data to one or more output devices or locations.

And yes, you can do much the same kind of stuff with XML. We’ve been particularly impressed with the Berkely XML DB, which can store XML snippets as entire objects (no need to rip them apart and store them in relational rows and columns), which makes for faster retrieval.

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Folks, we’re almost done with our series on content strategy. To quickly recap:

In part 1 of this series, we talked about content. In Part 2, we talked about your capabilities. In part 3, we talked about your audience. In Part 4, we took on user experience.

Now we turn to the base of the pyramid, the foundation of it all, without which the whole thing would come tumbling down. I promise to be brief, not only because this has been a long series, but because there’s only a little bit left to cover.

You can have scintillating content; software, tools, and workflow coming out your ears; a well-defined audience that you take care of at every level; and a user experience that is the envy of your peers and competitors.

You can have all of that and still be the proud owner of a content strategy that will eventually grind to a halt, fold in on itself, and lay in ruins at your feet. What am I talking about?

The foundation of any effective content strategy: research and improvement. It’s a continuous cycle of:

1. Evaluating, maintaining, and creating content. Don’t forget to expire the old stuff. Last year’s best practices aren’t necessarily best practices right now.
2. Segmenting your audience, responding to your audience, growing (or trimming) your audience focus, providing special content segments for your audience. The audience is your customer, treat them right!
3. Upgrading systems and tools, taking fresh looks at processes and workflows, making sure that everything still works as a well-oiled machine.
4. Removing ever single rough spot, zit, roadblock, blemish, tarpit, and minefield from every single page and interaction on your site. Just one weird or unexpected thing can cause the whole thing to unravel.

It takes a lot of guts to reevaluate everything you’ve put in place, but you have to do it. It’s a continuous cycle of improvements and adjustments. The ultimate payoff? A Web site whose content is 100% aligned with the goals of the organization.

That’s it–more than you ever wanted to know about content strategy. Let us know if we can help you with any of it on your site.

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