Strategy: Management

As you plan your strategy, it's important to create a management structure for your content. These are the guidelines you'll follow in authoring, evaluating, organizing, publishing, maintaining, storing, and accessing your content objects. In some cases your guidelines will be well documented including policies, procedures, standards, and style sheets. In other cases, you'll create a template or model that you'll refer to as you develop materials. The level of management really depends on the complexity of the project. If many people will be designing materials for the website, you may want standard procedure so that everyone organizes content in the same way. If you're the only one who will be working with the site, the content management tools will be personal reminders.

Although the content management guidelines may seem silly, they are essential for consistency. For example, will you capitalize the first letter in a bullet list? What size will you make your photographs?

A style sheet is one of the most important content management tools. You'll have the Cascading Styles Sheets (CSS) that are part of your HTML coding, but you may also want a document that contains general formatting and style guidelines.

A site map is a text and/or graphical representation of the website hierarchy. People often maintain two site maps: outline and diagram. Keep an outline containing the files and links that have been created. Many people design this as a web page and use it for quick access to pages as they are being built. This may become part of the table of contents, home page, or index page for the site. Also, maintain a visual diagram that contains proposed file names, notes, and other planning materials. This will also help you visualize the relationship among documents.

Read the off-site article Mixing Up Web Site Management by Leo Klein in The Library Journal. Create a visual map for one of the following libraries. Download the Inspiration software.

Las Vegas/Clark County Library District
Multnomah County Library