Once your website is initially launched, your job is to attract visitors by publishing new content regularly. At the same time, you must also keep an eye on older content—a task that grows over time.

Site update vs. redesign

Updating refers to the ongoing process of regularly adding and updating information within the present site structure—for example, publishing a new feature story each week or adding new links to a Related Sites page.

Redesign means changing the overall organization, audience definition, navigation, or graphical look of your website—for instance, resegmenting the content for a new audience or overhauling the home page. It’s as much work as the initial creation of the site.

Publishing processes

Establish your ongoing publishing process before you first launch your site. Decisions you make about file naming, file structure, tracking and authoring tools will determine how much new content you’ll be able to publish and how often.

 There are three ways to create and publish editorial content on the Web. You can:

• Author in HTML directly.
• Author using a word processing tool and then convert it to HTML.
• Use a publishing tool or content management system.

None of these solutions is perfect. Currently, most tools for authoring in HTML don’t include features that editorial teams rely on, such as revision marks and annotations. Using a word processor and then converting text creates other problems—writers can’t see what the page will look like in the browser and editors need to maintain two versions of each file (the document and the html file). 

Publishing tools, which store the content in a database and use a friendly form for authoring, hold the most promise but can be costly. Many open source versions are available for little or no cost, but often come with no documentation.

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Authoring process

Writing and editing for the Web follows almost the same process as for other media:

1. Research and write
2. Review and developmental edit
3. Rewrite
4. Substantive edit
5. Copyedit
6. Convert to HTML (if necessary)
7. Proof

The proofing step is more crucial, however. Create and follow a proofing checklist to catch all the formatting and link errors that can creep into Web pages.

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Archiving old content

A formidable challenge for editorial teams is what to do with content after it has aged. Links break, information changes or becomes less important. And the more content you publish, the larger the task becomes.

Simply ignoring old content won’t work—audiences will stop coming if they encounter erroneous information or too many broken links.  Deleting old pages isn’t always the right solution, either. You lose potentially valuable information and break links within your own site.

You can handle older content by:

• Adding a disclaimer to each old page. For example, “This article was originally published in October 1999 and has not been updated since.”
• Creating an official archive.
• Burying the content by deleting links to it on top-level pages and removing it from Search.

Figure out your archiving strategy before you launch your site. One key is to create and maintain a file list of all the files on your site. For each file, specify:

• File name and path
• Page title
• Date published
• Author and/or owner
• Brief description
• How often to review (e.g. every month, 3 months, 6 months)
• Importance

Examples:

• Disclaimer from MSDN
•  Archived articles by date from InfoDesign

Key concepts:  archive, site redesign, update

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More information

• Design Web Pages by Using Nested Tables in Word 2000 – Detailed instructions on using Word to create Web pages
• Doing a Content Inventory – Describes how to create a file list of all the pages on your site; includes a template.
• Get a Handle on Web Content – How content management tools can automate content creation and maintenance.
• How to Keep the Content Coming – Tips include structuring content around team strengths, not publishing too much at a time, and drawing attention to updates.
• HTML converters – Tools for converting text in different formats to HTML
• Managing Content on the Web – Overview of Web content management tools and processes.
• OpensourceCMS – You can try out several different open-source content management systems and download them for free. Categories include e-commerce, portals, blogs, groupware, forums, and e-learning.
• MyFreeTemplates – More than 30 polished Web templates that you can download and customize for personal use.

• Untangling Web Content Management – Defining site and infrastructure requirements of your content management system

• Windows HTML editors -- Most common tools for authoring pages in HTML

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