by Johnny Mone, Sales Team, Ephox

A web manager enters the department.

Hello I wish to register a complaint.

(The content owner does not respond.)

I wish to make a complaint!

This department is closed for lunch.

Never mind that, I wish to complain about this content that got published not half an hour ago from this very department.

Oh yes, the, uh, the new product page …What’s, uh…What’s wrong with it?

I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it.  It’s dead! The links don’t work, it doesn’t meet accessibility standards, it’s misspelled, it uses the old product names and old brand assets, that’s what’s wrong with it!

No, no, it’s uh,…it’s resting.

Look, matey, I know dead content when I see it, and I’m looking at some right now.

While the ‘dead parrot’ routine may not sketch perfectly the challenges of creating quality content, the sentiment is about right. The promise of web content management has, by and large, been fulfilled in that webmaster bottlenecks have been removed and non-technical business teams have the ability to create and publish web content without the help of the I.T. department.

But this facility is both an opportunity and a threat.

Sure, you can now get valuable content to market instantly but without proper quality control the content that is published may be destroying value rather than creating it.The new road to content takes you via pit-stops that fix the problems with your content before it is published so that it does not end up as dead as a … ‘dead parrot”.