Moving from a centralized to decentralize model for web content management

Probably the biggest thing I’ve been working on since I came to UH Libraries has been the move from a centralized to decentralized model for web content management. Much of this has been a technical challenge. No tools existed when I started 2 years ago for library staff to maintain their own content. However, to be honest, creating tools has been the easiest part of decentralizing control of the website.

The biggest challenge I’ve faced has been providing content owners with the skills to maintain their own content. Sometimes this has meant technical training, in the content management system, blogs, wikis, discussing how to mark content up semantically, and issues of accessibility (ie. please remember to use alt text).

However, most of the time this has meant trying desperately to get content owners to recognize that the web is not print. This means getting page owners to try and think critically about their pages and the content therein. I often find myself asking questions like:

• What is the purpose of this page?
• Who is the audience of this page?
• What do you want people to be able to do when they visit this page?
• How does this page related to the rest of the site? (Does this content exist someplace else on the site? What other pages might people visit before or after this page?)

A colleague at LITA Forum suggested that anyone who has to deal with web design decision needs to read “Don’t Make me Think” by Steve Krug and I’m thinking about making some sections of it mandatory reading for some of my content owners who have many pages to maintain.

I also desperately need to find a better way to make the data available from the server log analysis to page owner so they can see for their individual pages the number of visits, referrer etc. I think some of this data will help the page owners realize that their pages may not be as usable or findable as they believe.

Ultimately, my job isn’t content but sometimes it feels like there are aspects of my job which ARE content-oriented. A bit of this is editorial duties, by this I don’t mean fixing people’s grammar but rather “hey I need this piece of content and who is going to create it” or “hey this is too long and/or not for the right audience”. Part of this is as I said before, the whole decentralization process and page owners slowly learning what it is to own and maintain a web page. It really is a learning process because I have to distill much of what I’ve learned in the last 6 1/2 years as a web designer/developer into a set of useful essentials for page owners. So that the page owners, in turn, can make good decisions about the content on their pages.