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Developing Effective Websites: A Project Manager’s Guide
and have not yet been converted to browser-readable form. In addition, new content is being created for the Web, some by your development team, some by the
client. You can see the project management challenge that lies before you. To
make matters worse, you may even be depending on the client for the bulk of
your content. Therefore, you don’t have as much control over gathering it as you
might like. Your contact person with the client has logged much time in the early
planning of the site. She has made herself available to you through negotiating
and gaining approvals for the agreement. She breathed a sigh of relief once the
project was outsourced, happy to move on to other priorities. Nonetheless, she’s
reviewed the documentation discussed in this chapter. Has she been at work
preparing content while your team developed its specs and plans? Maybe not. Especially if you haven’t instructed her to do so. It’s not unusual for missed deadlines on content delivery from the client to gum up the works in a Web
development schedule. Once your design is hashed out, you should draw up a
list of content, along with delivery dates and the person responsible.
Organizations with rich content and a need for steady or frequent updates
should consider a content management system. Throughout this book, we have
recommended the advantages of a database-driven website. The content management system allows the various people who create, edit, or adapt content to
access it, review it, and import or export it from the database.
Managing content is an important aspect of website production, which is the
subject of the next chapter. We raise the issue here because of the option of a technology solution, which, if pursued, would be a consideration in developing the
technology specification.