The Content Garden

Avid gardeners have a knack for keeping their landscapes beautiful all year. Mums, asters and amaryllis brighten fall and winter days; peonies, irises and roses carry spring into summer. What’s the secret? It’s simple: know thy garden. As a content manager, you can heed this advice by understanding how long content stays in bloom, identifying areas that need pruning, scheduling ample time to weed their words, and coordinating year-round content cultivation.

Perennials vs. Annuals

Perennials come back year after year while annuals need to be replanted every spring. Likewise, legacy content lasts for the life of your site while revision content has a foreseeable end.

Your mission statement is an example of legacy content. While its message describes your company’s life-long purpose, some of the words used may take on new meaning as vocabulary changes. It’s important to manage the content, but reviews can be infrequent. Revision content is modified or retired on shorter timelines. Product descriptions may last a year or two while news articles may flourish and fade quickly.

Pruning and Replanting

Petals are dropping. Foliage is looking a bit wilted around the edges. It is the end of a season: should you prune content back or simply start over? How much effort is required? You need a plan for each fading bloom. This includes looking at what will take its place, how long will content take to create and how many people are needed to do the work. You have several options:

• You might archive or delete content according to your company’s document retention policies.
• You may reintegrate content from revision to legacy when it has earned a longer life via lasting reader interest.

Whatever the task, you should know how long it will take and ensure you have the right team in place to help. For example, let’s say the news section has 10 pieces of bi-weekly content, and that it takes 10 hours to author, edit, approve and publish each piece of content. This equals 100 hours of work. Two weeks of one person’s time only gets you 80 hours, so you need at least two people involved in content production.

In addition, remember that it may take a day for each stage of content creation. This may mean planning at least four days to get content from author to publisher. It’s easy to underestimate the amount of time it will take to create and maintain your content.

The Content Manager’s Almanac

Almanacs provide the details gardeners need to plan out the tasks that keep their gardens beautiful. Content managers can use software for the exact same thing. Spreadsheets are well-suited to this purpose and extremely flexible. Here’s one way to get started:

1. Create a detailed content profile for each page.
2. Establish the start date for the revision process.
3. Indicate the step to be taken when the content has faded (e.g. delete, archive or reintegrate).
4. Assign a due date and owner for each revision (including new content creation)

People stop to smell the roses when the gardens they pass look tidy and well cared for. The time you spend keeping your site in bloom is an investment that will keep people coming back to your site again and again.