When it comes to website projects, everybody’s searching for the best way to organize content. Imagine having a large Agile project, with many users, multiple language versions – sounds like a headache.
When it comes to best organizing content for a website project, problems that content teams often face during projects can be:
- Content is collected in Microsoft Word or Google Docs – not a good practice if you need a clear format!
- Delivery is questionable – are you sure that you can track it in a proper way
- Access issues and version control
- Having tons of spreadsheets to keep everything organized – also not a good idea!
- And finally – it is unclear who is working on what content and where content falls in the grand scheme of things.
While previously, it may have been difficult to get a handle on the content creation process, but I believe that there is something that can help you with your content troubles – GatherContent.
Before a project is started, there are planning sessions which should help to understand key responsibilities, project timeline and ultimately where content falls in the grand scheme of things. Ideally, that would last until the end of the project. But, reality is different. This all is impacting the content team and their ability to stay sharp and to control things.
With GatherContent you will be able to control your project phases with these three features available in the platform.
Workflow
Your own, personalized workflows are there to make your life easier. Depending on project scope, number of markets, roles and responsibilities you can setup workflow statuses. Typical workflows are In Progress, Ready for Review, Done, Blocked. One of the best parts is that these different statuses in GatherContent they are all different colors – and having visual cues is always good! In addition hovering over any color will give you a percentage of each status.
Templates
Everyone who has worked on content strategy and lots of its elements knows how hard it is to maintain all the important fields at once. Before setting up content templates, your content team needs to think about all the stakeholders of the project, SEO and other mandatory elements. When all work is done, someone needs to take care of that perfect chaos. Let me tell you why second place for awesomeness goes to templates in GatherContent.
Having a business rules in terms of content is an essential key to success of your first pass. Templates are there to determine page type and its structure. This is so important when dealing with different groups of content across website : Campaign pages, Blog Posts pages, Company information pages, E-commerce pages etc.
Structure of templates in GatherContent are customizable. Some of the most common fields that you can assemble on your template are:
- Radio Buttons
- Check Boxes
- Text Field
- Asset Field
When your page structure is done your template is ready to be migrated and assigned to actual page called item in Gather Content. Sounds cool, right?
Content
Don’t let this header to confuse you, content in this context is nothing else than an actual page in your project that was previously explained up above in ‘Templates’. But why is it so amazing?
- Having one page with correct content attached with exact structure of it is a good job.
- Having groups of same pages being built the same is wonderful.
- Having your whole sitemap well organized and easy to navigate, well, that rocks!
My favorite part about this amazing platform is something that I had to leave for the end of this post. Dealing with multiple users is always hard, but not with GatherContent. Again, the customized approach wins, this time with managing accounts. With Gather Content you can create custom roles.You can play with organizing people in groups, you can give different permissions. You can almost do everything that you can imagine with people organization across platform.
Everything that I mentioned before: Workflow, Templates, Content and Resources work so well together in the platform that it’s hard to think about how things can be done in a different way.
Have any questions or comments about using GatherContent? Feel free to fill out the contact form or comment on the post!
