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Summary
Let's summarize the rules that successful web operators must follow:
It's the assets, stupid!
Experiment. Iterate. Grow.
Respond to customers quickly and frequently, or lose them!
Enable the masses!
Make it manageable and reproducible.
The rules reflect the changing nature of web properties. First, web assets of your organization distill the content and logic of the operation. The web unifies previously separate efforts. In a commerce web property, marketing and product information previously were the province of the marketing group—for example, marketing produces assets, such as price lists and brochures. Separately, the information technology group maintains equally important supply-chain and order-management systems, such as application programs and database update scripts that run those systems. With the Internet, these previously separate efforts are united within a web -based operation.
Second, the Internet forces assets to evolve rapidly and keep up with the mercurial environment. Visitors to a web property have come to expect rapid change. They expect fresh content and frequently upgraded service offerings, as well as new, more powerful functionality. Because they expect it to be so, operators of web properties are compelled to fulfill those expectations.
Third, try different approaches through experimentation and iteration at all levels. Because of the newness of the technologies and the novel possibilities that they introduce, there isn't an unequivocal right and wrong way of doing things. Your customers always want more. At the microscopic level, individual contributors try different layouts and navigational models, to see how they look and feel. At the macroscopic level, web teams introduce new features and then tweak them based on actual usage.
Fourth, the web brings together a diverse band of contributors. The talents of writers, developers, artists, and marketers combine to infuse life into a modern web property. People contribute in many roles and capacities: as full-time employees, as contractors, as outside vendors, and as independent "stringers."
Fifth, the content-management infrastructure binds the mixture together as the "glue" that makes the process manageable and reproducible. Just as Fredrick Taylor espoused the "scientific management" of manufacturing enterprises in the early 1900s, web content management is likewise a principled approach to management of a web property.
As we will see in the coming articles, the process of developing and managing a web property can be codified into a collection of best practices.