Web Content Life Cycle

 Joe teaches us what he has learnt about Web Content Life Cycles...

After spending some time looking over different people’s views on web content life cycles I have decided to put my own opinion out there. 

There have been vast changes in what is thought to be involved in the life cycle of web content. The way that I understand “Web Content Life Cycle” is the different phases that your content goes through from start to finish including the idea of it through to it being replaced. 

It all started with the idea of contents life consisting of two phases which were collecting and delivery. This would be writing the content and publishing it, nothing more that. There have been various other suggestions including the humorous suggestion of there being 15 stages to the web content life cycle. 

My opinion is very similar to that of CM Pros which is that there should be 6 main stages but each stage is broken down into a few different parts. These stages are:

Plan, Develop, Manage, Deploy, Preserve and Evaluate. 

Each stage is then broken down for example Develop, consists of Create, Capture, Collect, Categorize and Edit. By breaking down each stage means that each corner of the process is covered and the best content is delivered. 

I believe that not all content needs to be replaced regularly and that if content is good and strong with a few tweaks and updates it can stay good informative and strong. This goes with the stage preserve, updating and adding to existing content is a good way to keep it alive and not having to come up with new content to replace it. 

By using this method of updating and evaluating your content you can keep it as up to date, valid and relevant as possible. Having up to date relative content is extremely important as the more relevant your content the better for SEO purposes. Content will become outdated at some point and will need to be replaced to stop it becoming legacy content and it being useless. This is when the evaluation will tell us that it is time to replace the content with new fresh ideas and information.