by Betsy Balgooyen, Senior Project Manager
19. May 2009 16:32
Frequently refreshing your website content gets visitors interested in returning, and makes a positive impression on potential and existing customers. The effort may seem daunting. But with a content management system and dynamic content your website can do a lot of the work of staying up to date.
Content Management Systems (CMS) have been around for quite a while now, at least in web time. They enable you to edit your content through a WYSIWYG (what you see, is what you get) editor with varying degrees of user friendliness. A majority of websites are now managed this way. With the right planning and weekly attention content can stay fresh–provided the organization has the resources to stay on top of it.
But if you can’t keep up with the weekly updates, consider adding additional features to help you. Many content management systems have add-on features or modules that can be used to make content appear on a schedule. Modules like a calendar of events or a newsroom/articles manager often allow you to define start and end dates for content. Calendar entries could be for events you are attending, or events of interest to the industry, so the information may not have a long shelf life. Beware of sunsetting content without enough to replace it though–you don’t want to be displaying a blank page.
Then there are modules like an Ad Manager. The primary purpose of such a module may be to handle ads on behalf of other organizations, but why can’t those banners be yours? Using them for content rather than promotion is another way to change information on your website throughout the week, or even throughout the day.
The destinations and enrichment areas of the cunard.co.uk and cunard.com websites are excellent examples of dynamic content at work. Speakers, programs and tours that will be offered on individual voyages can be accessed from multiple locations throughout the site and managed simply through one administrative interface. When content managers enter an item to appear, they also select the associated voyage or the start and end dates for the content. The website has been programmed to display only the content that is valid for the current date and the selected voyage. Passengers return to the site often to get the latest updates on the tours and speakers for their voyages.
If you are looking to keep your website constantly fresh, be sure to use a CMS with options that help you to add and manage dynamic content.
Betsy Balgooyen is Project Manager for Quicksilver’s Internet team and has been keeping the world abreast of the events and activities of Cunard’s QM2 and QE2 for more than five years.
