Kevin Wright’s blog

The project manager must monitor the content development process closely. Programmers and graphic artists will be able to complete much of their work using dummy data. Sooner or later, however, the content must arrive. Missing or late content, especially with accountability on the client end, is a leading cause of deadline slippage. It’s important to stay on top of the content situation. Content encompasses multiple media-written text, graphics, photos, audio, or video. The files may be stand-alone for HTML calls into a static Web page, or they may be records in a backend database.
Often, the content needs work on the developer’s end. You can control the amount of work by writing detailed specs for content in production guidelines; however, it might be advantageous to the schedule for members of the development team to take on some of the content development responsibility. For instance, suppose the marketing design staff of the client is modifying print graphics for use on the website, but they lack experience with Web graphics. It would be more efficient for your experienced Web artists to assume this task. In fact, they might end up redoing the client’s work anyway, which leaves you with the worst of both worlds. Of course, preparing the graphics files is a commitment of time and resources. If this responsibility is beyond the scope of the agreement, then additional compensation is appropriate.
Not only does the content need to come in according to schedule, but it must also be satisfactory in quality. It probably will not be possible for you to check every piece of content personally, and in fact, you may not feel qualified to judge it. You should, however, establish a system that ensures that somebody is responsible. The Web is full of copy that, by all appearances, has never been edited. Companies take great care in editing and proofreading brochures or press releases, yet when it comes to publishing on the Web, quality control seems to relax or be nonexistent. The nature of Web pages is that editorial changes are easy to implement after publication, whereas with print pieces you get only one shot. Nonetheless, it’s best to resist the temptation to ‘worry about that later.’ Print and graphical content should be checked against the specifications you’ve communicated and for a general quality review.
Content development for a website project is accomplished in one of two ways:
1. offline content development
2. online content development
 
Offline Content Development

In offline content development, as the name would indicate, you build pages offline, on a workstation rather than on a Web server. You would generally use this method in building a basic site of static pages. In this process, you build pages or content files and, when complete, they are uploaded (copied) to the server. This procedure is generally the case for regular HTML pages or fully prepared database files. Master templates or style sheets for the design can make offline development much more efficient. Nonetheless, the technique is not very scalable to websites that contain many pages.

Online Content Development

As a site grows, the viability of updating and adding pages manually diminishes, until it becomes less and less feasible. As an extreme example, imagine building all of the pages for a site like Weather.com, which gives up-to-the-minute weather maps and forecasts for cities nationwide. Maintaining a site like Weather.com, or Amazon.com with so many individual product pages, is possible only because the content is drawn from a database.
Each page is created ‘on-the-fly’ by the server in response to your request. When, for example, you request the weather report for Chicago, your computer sends the request in the form of a command to the Weather.com server. The server then follows three steps:
1. Finds the generic ‘weather report’ page (an ‘empty’ template page without data).
2. Looks up the data for that location and places it in the proper spots on the template page.
3. Sends you that newly created page.
So, through automation, creating such a rich site is a piece of cake. Well, almost. Data must still be created and placed in the database.
The Web development team can access the backend database online and maintain it from any Web-connected browser. E-commerce sites commonly use an online content development process. Company personnel must continually update information, adding new products, deleting old ones, and changing prices, or posting new promotions. Those closest to these marketing and product decisions are probably not database experts; however, user-friendly interfaces simplify the process. Using standard browser software, authorized staff can access Web pages set up to edit records in the database through text-based form fields, pulldown lists, and dialog boxes. With appropriate security and authentication processes in place, staff or contractors can maintain the site from any location connected to the Internet.
Online content development is a powerful tool. With some upfront investment, you gain tremendous scalability with database-driven websites, which is truly a strategic asset in today’s Web marketplace.