Content lifecycle

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Web content lifecycle scheme

The content lifecycle or content life cycle describes the life stages of the contents of a document . In connection with publication on the web , one speaks of the web content lifecycle .

The individual phases are explained below and shown in the graphic.

Create content

In this phase, the authors create the various objects (assets) from which the later page should consist. This can be text, but also graphics, videos or other media formats. These are called " content ". When creating the content, one also uses targeted research for existing information. It must therefore be questioned which sources of information are used most frequently. The sources of information also include our own archive and our own publications (here: publications of the company / institute). Another source of content creation is the use of content syndication offers .

Control and release

In this phase, the previously created content is checked for factual and creative correctness (e.g. in the case of images) (also called quality assurance). In the simple case, this is done by the content creator himself; However, typical here is the introduction of a hierarchy in which the review must then be carried out by one or more appropriately authorized employees (editors). If there is only one reviewing editor, one speaks of the 4-eyes concept: Only when the content has been accepted by 2 people (here: editor and author) can the page be passed on for publication. If the check is negative, the content is sent back to the author for post-processing.

Publish

After a document has been approved, it is ported into the desired format in this phase and saved under a specified address. The essential step in this phase is that the content is now made readable for the public. Depending on the type of publication technology and the management system used, this phase is time-consuming: When publishing on the WWW, it is not enough to just generate a new website and store it somewhere on the web server; References must at least be set from the index of the website, the individual parts of the website , which in addition to the pure ( HTML ) text consist of images and other objects, must be saved and the access rights must be set so that the target audience can read the new website can.

If you as an author or editor use only a web editor to publish an HTML page, such as B. Microsoft Frontpage or Macromedia Dreamweaver, many of the tasks outlined above are handled by site management functions. However, these functions are far from sufficient to manage complex websites that consist of several thousand to millions of objects and require special control and approval cycles. This task can only be carried out with the support of approval workflows and database-supported publishing from an editorial system , web content management system or enterprise content management system .

Archiving

As information becomes out of date, it must be ensured that it is automatically archived after a specified period of time or that it is processed. As with publishing, it must be ensured when archiving that the content can also be accessed later for research purposes. This is e.g. B. essential for legally binding content. At the same time, and this is one of the most important points in archiving , it must be ensured that existing references from pages that are still up-to-date are not made invalid by archiving or lead to an error.

In the case of smaller companies or institutes, pure archiving does not play a major role, so that the pages may not be backed up, but deleted. This also happened with traditional web publishing , which later turned out to be a big mistake in many cases: Knowledge was lost through the deletion, even if it appeared to be out of date and unimportant at the time of deletion. However, especially in the field of scientific publications, a review of old publications is of great importance and importance for compliance with the (natural) scientific method .

If business transactions are carried out via the website ( electronic trading ), the transaction data must be archived, as they represent original data relevant to commercial law ( GoBS ) or tax law ( GDPdU ).

Another aspect that emphasizes the importance of archives is the "protection of face" of a company in the event of an emergency. The damage to the image due to a hacker break- in that damages the website can be kept small by importing a backup .

See also