When talking shop on Content Strategy, the typical conversational presets for most individuals concern the What and the Where; what kind of content to produce to meet sales and strategy goals and where that content is hosted and then syndicated.

For businesses and brands that are just realizing the power of Content Marketing in their owned channels, little thought is placed into the How. As in, “How am I getting this blog post up on my site in a captivating way?” or, “How am I going to make this interior page always feel fresh and never static?” and most importantly, “How can I do all that without feeling like I’m battling my own website to get it done?”

With business owners left and right feeling disenfranchised with the ability to manage their own content on legacy Content Management Systems (CMS), with being locked out of their websites altogether by development firms or unable to make quick changes or additions to their content roll due to lack of technological savvy; I find that with content marketing experiencing the success that it is, having a sense of an empowerment with ones own web property is just as important as having the website in the first place.

And that’s where I come in.

In today’s post I want to shed a little extra insight into the development phase of our process here at Durkan Group when building out your brand new, or soon-to-be redesigned website as it pertains to advanced content management.

It Starts with WordPress

If you’ve taken a full gander around durkangroup.com, you may have noticed that the team here, when not building out eCommerce sites, is pretty fancy of the WordPress CMS. For us, all good things rest on a great foundation and, with your website, that foundation starts with the WordPress CMS.  Here’s why…

• As an administrative dashboard for managing content, WordPress is inherently easy to use. The organization of major touch points in the dashboard is extremely straightforward; you have pages, posts, and then the taxonomy rules to filter the display of the content types on the front-end of the site. You also have a never-ending library to stuff media (photos, documents, whitepapers, etc.) into and can pull from it at any time to produce content.
• Accessing a WordPress admin dashboard has also become more easy through time. Not only can you make changes to your website from your laptop or desktop computer at home or the office, but you can also drill into pages and their content from your tablet or mobile device and have the relatively same user experience as you would if sitting at the desk.
• Lastly, WordPress is so flexible that there are unlimited opportunities for enhancements, customization, and future changes to your website. This ease is  what allows us to make extremely complex, high-end designs easily accessible to your on-going management. Every site that walks out the door, even though it’s built on the same WordPress, is completely unique and custom-tailored to the goals and management styles of you and your team.

Custom Fields & Post-Types

After the site design has been sliced into WordPress I begin to work closely with the lead developer as the backend of your new website begins to take shape. At this point, I’ve been running through your current content and examining your content goals moving forward from Go Live. Now, before things become too “locked in stone” I begin to make recommendations to the developer on how to best structure the input fields that host the content per post or page type. We do this by outfitting the CMS with Custom Post-Types that are comprised of individually-created fields so that data can be input easily, without hassle and allows you to focus on the content rather than fighting with the display.

So, depending on the front-end objective of the page or post in question I begin to help the developer structure the placement of these fields and ensure that no stone goes uncovered, while keeping top-of-mind the capabilities and limitations that are possessed by your team or operation.

Also, depending on you or your content manager’s level of familiarity with the platform, I dictate what rule sets are in place to validate your content before publication. What this does is make sure that pages and posts are complete and are displaying on the front end in the manner in which you desired and how originally envisioned in the design phase of our process.

Sometimes, based on my discovery, I will recommend that fields, their instructional snippets, and the conditional logic be completely overhauled or worked anew  – this is just us adapting to your evolving situation and content management desires.

Below is a lightweight example of how these post types and fields come together to build a page. This is from our own backend here at durkangroup.com and is set up as such to illustrate briefly how we use these tools to your advantage in providing a heightened ability to get quality content out the door quickly.

Here we see the management page for our Case Study on the work performed for PlatypusHome.com. Starting with a custom template that calls for the custom fields that were established during the Discovery phase, we can see the inputs for content that directly match the top-down structure of the case study on the front end of the site. With this level of organization and structure coupled with the styling rules set for each field  in place, you will be empowered to publish high-end content for your web visitors without having to worry about anything more than the composition itself.

Dynamic Image Management

Also working in the background are rule sets and plugins that we establish to dynamically handle the images that are required for the page or post type in question. We understand that you may not have a designer in-house or may not even be comfortable re-sizing or touching up the images that are needed. So, along with instructional snippets in the input field concerning the images, we specially-craft certain rule sets in the backend to handle the different styling parameters of the images that fit into the page or post. This way, the content manager can essentially “fire and forget” once the image has been uploaded to the page or post.

If we take a look at the PlatypusHome Case Study example once more, you can see how we use these rule sets to manipulate a source image to fit into the design scheme without having to spend significant effort or time in photo editing.

Uploaded Header Image

Front-end Display of Header Image

Here, though shown in the same dimension, the uploaded photo was scaled to fit the container and subtle styling was applied to darken the image and overlay the pattern that ensures our navigation menu remains visible and vibrant.

Too easy.

Keeping the Blinders On with Custom-Tailored Dashboards by User Role

Even with all of the little techniques employed to make managing content as easy as possible within pages and posts, the CMS is still home to all other non-content related settings, options and various configurations that pertain to your site; settings that you or members of your team don’t need to be distracted by when managing content.

To keep content management as efficient and effective as possible, most of our custom-built websites on WordPress are deployed with rule sets that govern user behavior by role within the organization. WordPress actually does something like this to start with user types such as Admin, Editor and Subscriber, but we take it to the next level by compiling all of the tools that are scattered about the CMS and localize them into a series of menus that are easy to navigate to and provide no opportunity to stray off into the world of distraction.

Ready to Feel Empowered?

By the end of the development phase I begin to port over and optimize your existing content or newly-desired content for the website. At this point, I have established such a strong familiarity with your custom WordPress site and dashboard that when you and your content manager come in for training, I am ready to make you an expert as well.

Now, the question is: how empowered are you to make content updates and run a strong content marketing strategy through your current website? Not feeling very empowered at all?

That’s okay, we can help.