Content Governance
Good content governance keeps your boss happy and fosters confidence in your site's audiences.
It all starts with a few good habits.
Resources:
Spreadsheet of content/asset management happening in our Gutenberg sites
Web Content Management: Best Practices
Michigan Engineering’s Office of Communications and Marketing provides a web publishing platform for our office and academic departments within the College. Content management refers to the ways in which we store, organize, create, and delete content within our system. Good content management practices are critical for the health of our sites and enable a better experience for site administrators and content creators.
By following the guidelines in this document, the back end of your site will remain well-organized, consistent, and navigable. You will avoid bloated media libraries and user lists, and the database that powers your site will remain clean and performant, creating a better experience for your end users.
Governance by Content type
Pages and Posts
Primary admin AND the person who created have responsibility for pages
Primary admin does periodic checks (recommended quarterly).
If a person has multiple drafts or unpublished posts in the site, admin alerts them, asks them to review and remove any unnecessary content.
Content that isn’t meant to ever be live (ie. design spec, experimental) should be done in stage site
stagecoewww.wpengine.com, stagecoenews.wpengine.com or [dept acronym].stageengdepts.wpengine.com
Your Google login should work there
Stage content disappears when updates are pushed. If the review period spans an update, do the work in training.engin.umich.edu instead.
If you do create experimental content on training.engin.umich.edu, you should delete when you no longer need it. If you are creating content to test functionality, delete the content when you finish experimenting. If you are creating a new page design, delete the content when the design has been approved and implemented.
If page content and layout needs to be saved for posterity,
switch to code view, copy and paste code into a google doc. (Duplicate a page instructions)
take a screenshot of the live page and paste image into doc.
Save the doc in a folder you can find again using a naming convention that makes sense to you. We recommend using the naming convention [PageTitle Date] for the doc, where date is the numeric month, day year when the content was captured. For example:
File name: Student Research 01112022
Store it in a folder called Web Content Archive
Posts
Primary admin and news editor have responsibility for posts
Primary admin and/or news editor should establish an editorial workflow
Images
Primary admin has the following responsibilities:
Delete unused and duplicate images from media library
Note that images that are listed as “detached” may still be in use as a background images on a cover block or a section block. DO NOT just delete images because they don’t appear to be attached to anything.
Make sure images are optimized using the Image processing guidelines.
Documents
Primary admin has responsibility
All documents (PDFs, Word docs, Excel sheets, etc.) should be stored externally (google drive or dropbox) and linked to.
Storing external documents outside the WordPress media library helps keep overall site size down (helping with stability and speed) and allows for files that are larger than the media library’s upload size limit.
Users
Primary admin has responsibility to maintain
Periodically (quarterly or each semester) look through users and delete anyone who is no longer with your office/dept.
Ideally, only one person should have the “administrator” role (can be more but err on the side of caution when granting access.)
Categories and tags
Primary admin and news editor have responsibility
Delete any tags or categories that have no stories associated with them.
New tags should only be created when there are a threshold number of stories associated (suggested threshold:10)
Be aware that removing a tag will break any links you’ve created to that tag.
Governance by Lifespan
Are you going to use it again? If yes, it’s OK to keep one version of it around. Be aware that updates to the theme might make some blocks on your draft obsolete.
Some examples of limited-lifespan content
Short-lifespan landing page (in the marketing funnel sense): if it has a date on it, it should be deleted after the date has passed.
Job postings page: can be unpublished or removed from navigation when not needed
Temporary announcement: Delete when expired.
Alerts: just use the alert block! Don’t make a page.
Naming conventions
People
Firstname, lastname, using official first reference in MCommunity. If there’s a conflict, College site should take its cue from department site.
No middle initial unless:
There are multiple people within department with the same first/last name
They are the dean and require that their middle initial is present
Legacy sites need to be updated per this naming convention.
Featured image - This is the large image that appears as a header background on news stories
[story keyword]-featured.jpg (or .png or whatever format)
Contact (author) and researchers
[lastname]-portrait.jpg
Other secondary and associated visuals (“content” images)
[story keyword]-[image keyword].jpg (story keyword will be the same as on featured image for that story)
Full-width CTA background images
[descriptive image keyword].jpg
File names
Use only English-language alphanumeric characters
As short as possible while still being meaningful
No spaces
Avoid dashes and underlines
Use camel case for multiple word filenames (ThisIsCamelCase)