Content area
Full Text
Keywords
Information, Internet, Database management systems, Publishing
Abstract
The volume of digital content available on the World Wide Web has increased dramatically over the past six years. Some form of Web content management (WCM) system is becoming essential for organisations with a significant Web presence as the volume of content continues to proliferate. WCM systems have evolved rapidly from the basic HTML editors of six years ago, to the sophisticated content production and publishing tools available today. This paper presents a WCM hierarchy, examines the underlying Web content management lifecycle, and identifies the key market trends for WCM systems.
1. Introduction
All Web sites display and/or process content in order to convey information to their audiences. In parallel with the growth of the Internet, content volumes have grown rapidly. In 1992, there were just 1,000 pages on the Web. As of June 2000, over two billion Web pages were posted on the Internet (Ektron, 2001). As at December 1996, only 32.7 per cent of Fortune 150 firms had Web sites, according to Cox et al. (2001). This had grown to 94.7 percent by January 1998 (Cox et al., 2001). The current rate of growth shows no signs of dissipating.
Some form of content management (CM) process or system is becoming essential for all organisations with a significant Web presence as the amount of digital content continues to proliferate (Butler Group, 2001). As the Web moves from small, informally designed Web sites into large, rapidly changing sites, the need for strong management tools has become pressing. Software product companies have moved to address this need and call their offerings content management systems. Such systems help a business to set-up and organise their Web site(s), so that the Web sites can grow and change rapidly while maintaining high quality (Boiko, 2001).
In this paper, the author presents two models that enable a clearer understanding of Web content management and its underlying activities. The WCM four layer hierarchy presents a view of WCM as a series of layers, from the Web audience layer through to the content level. The WCM lifecycle then discusses the iterative nature of WCM and the core components of the lifecycle.
The research for this paper was obtained from industry...