Five Motives for Publishing via the Web Content Format

What format should I be publishing my content in? This is a question we come across a lot in our work. Business documents exist in a wide variety of formats from Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF to web content and everything in between. As publishing models continue to evolve, distributed authorship capabilities are increasingly being offered to a wider, more disparate set of business users. This decentralized approach, while pushing document management directly into the hands of business owners, also supports its rapid publication and delivery to consumers.

Depending on the size of the organization, hundreds or even thousands of documents may be created on a weekly or monthly basis. The sheer volume of information can quickly become overwhelming and unfortunately, a trend that is becoming all too familiar is that the easier it becomes to publish documents, the harder it becomes for users to find and use them. 

This is certainly the case for content published in formats such as Word and PDF which are typically lengthy, self-contained and have very few (if any) relationships defined between them and other content items. The most popular reasons we hear from our clients for publication in these formats is due to the ease of creation as well as for printability.

People have become accustomed to working with applications such as Microsoft Word and are intimately familiar with the features and functionality provided. Thus, migrating to content creation online via the web format using predefined templates, rich text editors and associated workflow can be seen as cumbersome, easily frustrating and lacking in functionality. Additionally, converting existing content stored within these formats into web content can be a significant undertaking.

Modularizing Content Architectures

Nevertheless, creating a more modularized content architecture by breaking larger self-contained documents down into smaller, more manageable web content chunks increases the potential for both reuse and findability. Five advantages to publishing via the web content format include:  

1. Content Authorship & Publishing - Oftentimes, multiple owners or contributors are responsible for content contained within a single document. Republishing individually as web content provides for distribution of responsibility along with the application of permissions at a more granular level, thus leading to improved management across different sections and/or areas of the content itself. 
    
2. Content Delivery & Syndication - Web content items simplify the delivery of meaningful and more targeted information to a wider variety of platforms. Because the layout of web content is flexible, it becomes significantly simpler to repurpose for a variety of devices, such as standard Web browsers, smart phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and the emerging category of mobile access platforms such as the iPad. 
    
3. Content Relation & Discovery - Subsections of a document implemented as web content can easily be dynamically associated with related content through the application of taxonomy and metadata. Relationships between items can be clearly called out and prominently displayed for users’ further enabling and promoting discoverability. Taxonomic and metadata properties individually applied to sections of a document can be leveraged to improve both navigation and the search experience and, cross-linking between specific content items becomes easier due to their own physical existence. 
    
4. Social Collaboration & Tagging - In more socially receptive organizations, publishing information as web content via platforms such as blogs or wikis enable the application of Web 2.0 functionality to that content. Commenting, user feedback and even rating systems may be applied and leveraged in the delivery of information via topical relationships or used to enhance the search experience as part of search result presentation in the user interface. 
    
5. Personalization - A lengthy document itself may potentially reference a variety of subjects or topics with some meaningful to a user or group and others not. Web chunking allows these specific sections of a document to be targeted to these individual based on self-selected interests and/or permissions group assignment.  The ability to both push and pull meaningful information to users based on attributes of the users themselves is more easily accomplished through the application of unique attributes to that information.  

So, where does all this leave us? What’s the answer to the question as to the best format for publication? Well, as any Consultant will tell you, the answer is…it depends. It’s dependent on a number of factors, all of which are unique to the organization itself. It depends on things like the purpose for which the content itself is intended to be consumed, the audiences that do the consuming, the design of the publishing model and the maturity level of publishers, technological limitations existing within the corporate environment and methods of delivery. 

Ultimately, the goal is ensure users have the ability to locate and easily consume information in a reasonable amount of time. The format with which content delivery takes place is an important aspect of both findability and discoverability. In order to be successful it must also be supported by well defined and easily understandable information architecture that includes a solid taxonomy and metadata strategy, effectively designed access mechanisms such as search and navigation and a well constructed and user tested interface.