Content Management

Content management refers to the practices and technologies used to create, organize, store, deliver, and track information in any form. This information, or content, includes text, images, videos, audio files, and presentations.

Content audit

A content audit is a systematic process of reviewing and analyzing all the content on your website or within a specific content marketing campaign. The goal of a content audit is to assess your website’s strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement.

A content audit is an essential first step in any website redesign process. Mature sites that have grown in size over time also benefit from periodic content audits as a matter of hygiene.

By conducting a content audit, you can gain valuable insights to:

• Make data-driven content decisions.
• Improve the overall quality and effectiveness of your content.
• Maximize the return on investment for your content marketing efforts.
• Attract more qualified visitors to your website.

Completing a content audit and taking appropriate steps to improve and refine your website based on the audit findings will help ensure your website feels fresh and relevant.

Accuracy and timeliness

The accuracy of content on Rutgers websites is critical as sites are developed and maintained. When developing your website, consider what sort of information you can effectively maintain and keep up to date. Proofread all content for accuracy and style; ensure grammatical and spelling errors are resolved before publishing.

An appropriate site manager within the unit should be designated as responsible for ensuring that all content on the unit’s Rutgers website is accurate and timely.

Websites should be audited at least annually and ideally every semester. Maintaining accuracy and timeliness includes:

• Unpublishing out-of-date content, including documents that are no longer relevant
• Updating old photos, videos, and images
• Moving older content that must be maintained on the site to an archive and/or clearly labeling it so visitors to the site can tell that the information is for historical reference
  • Consider deindexing archival content so it does not appear in search engine results
• Regularly checking the site for broken links and updating accordingly
• Adding and deleting people from directories as appropriate; look throughout the site for other places where employees might be listed and update accordingly
• Removing old/past events

Audience awareness

Audience awareness refers to the understanding of who you’re creating content for. It’s the foundation of any successful content strategy. The goals:

• Knowing Your Audience: Understand your target audience’s demographics (age, location, interests), needs, challenges, and preferred content formats (articles, videos, infographics).
• Tailoring Content: With this knowledge, tailor your content to resonate with their specific interests and address their pain points
• Right Tone and Style: Use the appropriate tone and style that aligns with your audience. Remember your content will be consumed on a screen.
• Writing for the Web: Structuring your content into chunks, with ample use of headings and bullets, to help your audience, who generally scans before they read.
• Content Relevance: Focus on creating content that is relevant and valuable to your audience. This will keep them engaged and coming back for more.

Document management

Website content management systems (CMSs) like Drupal and WordPress are not solutions for complex document workflows. However, CMSs are suitable for organizing and serving basic documentation to website users. Hosting documents like PDFs, DOCs, XLSs, etc. on a website comes with some best practices:

• Remove Old Versions of Documents: Any file that gets updated should replace itself. Website content managers must ensure that old versions of files are unpublished and that any links to these files are edited to direct to the current version.
  • Don’t just replace links; documents will be indexed by search engines and are still published on your site, even if you’re not linking to them.
  • Delete outdated documents from your CMS so they don’t appear on Google searches.
• Clear Versioning: Documents hosted on your website should be labeled clearly and cleanly.
  • Avoid production artifacts in your file name, such as “Test_Document_v2-JFedits”
  • Don’t rely on the file name alone as the only means of versioning.
  • Avoid using spaces in your file name. Use _ (underscore) and - (dash) between words to keep your file URL readable.
  • Avoid using dates or other time references in your file name. Version information should be inside the file or in the revision log field.
• Consider the Cloud: Consider whether your document needs to be searchable on Google; if not, consider hosting your document on the Rutgers SharePoint for easier versioning and access control.

Sitemap

A sitemap is a file that lists the important webpages on your website and their relationship to each other. It’s serves as a map for search engines, helping them discover and index valuable content you have on your site.

Your CMS or an online tool can help you generate a sitemap for your website. Once you have your sitemap file, you can submit it to search engines like Google via their webmaster tools.

By having a well-structured and up-to-date sitemap, you can improve your website’s search engine visibility and ensure search engines can find and index the valuable content you offer.

Editorial style

Websites should maintain a consistent editorial style in order to facilitate understanding, maintain accuracy, decrease confusion, and provide a better user experience.

Units are encouraged to use the Rutgers Editorial Style Guide to simplify style options and provide naming conventions at the university. Units can tailor the guidelines to fit their website’s purpose but should refrain from using organizational jargon and acronyms.