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Creating Content
12 February 2001

Granularity! That was one of the key messages from a recent conference I attended. The event was called Website Content Management for Travel. At first glance, this does not sound a very compelling subject, but our online population of would-be travellers have a huge thirst for information. You may think you are in the game of tour operating or travel agency but you are also a content provider and it is your job to quench this thirst. If you are not going about this in the right way you are making a lot of work for yourself.

Right now, the industry is geared up to producing printed brochures. Typically, brochure content will come from many sources. Images might be slides or prints held by a repro house, hotel and resort description will have been written on a word processor probably within the Marketing Department. Prices will be held in spreadsheets by Product Planning. This all comes together in brochure production. Great for the brochure, lousy for anything else.

A few enlightened travel companies have realised that this is a real issue and are changing the way they work. Bigger tour operators and travel companies are investing in content management systems. These are basically depositories of information that is held within a database such that it can be fed out to any delivery channel, be it a Web site, brochure production, WAP site or CD ROM. This one sentence description belies the technical and organisational complexity of getting content management properly set-up.

It is worth the effort though. The payback is ongoing savings in time and effort throughout the publishing process and improved control of data. What you say on your Web site should now agree with what you print in your brochure. Lead times are reduced and accuracy increased.

Now, you may think that content management is only applicable to the big boys. Of course, you are wrong. Whilst I would not suggest for a minute that smaller companies should invest in expensive content management systems, there is much you can do with your PC and some common sense. It is really a question of thinking about how best to organise and store all your data. For example, create meaningful names for word processor files. "grand hotel description 010212.doc" tells you exactly what the document is and when it was written. (By the way, writing dates backwards - year, month, day, means all versions of a file with the same name will be automatically sorted in date order.) Put hotel description files into folders with resort names. Store images in a similar way with file names that relate to the text files. All very simple stuff, but you will be surprised how much easier it makes life.

My message is to get your content organised. But what is granularity? It is breaking your content down into its smallest elements so that it can be delivered and re-built anyway you want. Bet you always wanted to know that!

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