Take Full Responsibility For Your Web Content

Here's a golden rule for web publishing: You should only publish on your website the content that you can professionally manage.

Managing content involves managing its entire life cycle. The life of a particular piece of content begins with its first draft. It ends when that content is removed from publication. Removing content is as important as publishing it.

The Web has extended the life cycle of content. Many organizations have not established new processes and responsibilities to deal with this extension. Print content has well-established processes to remove from publication what is old or unnecessary.

If you are a newspaper, once your publication is a couple of days old, it gets dumped. If you are a book publisher, those books that don't sell are discounted or get returned and pulped.

It's different on the Web. When content is published it stays published unless there is a deliberate decision to remove it from publication. Publishing is about delivering the right content to the right person at the right time at the right cost.

Old content means that you are not publishing the right content. It also increases the amount of time your reader spends searching for your content. Old content is wrong content. It gives the wrong information. It's the wrong form, the wrong instructions, the wrong date, the wrong name for the head of marketing.

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