When people use Content Workflow for website redesigns or for designing new websites, the production process varies significantly after you’ve launched your website. Some people don’t even consider what happens when the go-live button has been pressed.

The most considerable difference across all projects is Workflow, the statuses that exist in each project. Once the project is finished, items will likely be marked as ‘approved’ or ‘published’ and previous to that there will have been a production process that goes through multiple stages of reviewing, drafting, editing and maybe even auditing of old content.

Once the main project is done and the site is live, it makes sense to transition to a simpler Workflow. This might include a status called ‘live’ so all your items in your project might be currently marked as live. You could then have a status called ‘needs updating’ and the general workflow would be if you or anyone in your company or any of your clients or your team want to update an item or piece of content, then you can go to Content Workflow mark it as needs updating and do the round of edits.

This communicates to the relevant CMS manager, or the person responsible for ongoing content governance, that the piece of content needs to be updated. This is a great way to keep content relevant, accurate and updated without having to learn how to use the CMS and it is an easy way for people to be notified about changes that need to be made to the website by having the content emailed to them.

An initial Workflow status you might consider is ‘new piece of content’ (eg staff bios or product pages). This would use an existing template so the person responsible would create the content, populate the field, mark it as new and then notify the relevant person who needs to add it to the CMS.

This ensures the CMS stays consistent with Content Workflow at all times which is really the ultimate aim of using Content Workflow post-launch.

You can also set due dates for the future. You may have a Workflow status called ‘needs reviewing’ or ‘content checking’ and these dates can be set at whatever interval is best for you such as 3 months, 6 months or further down the line as needed.

That piece of content will then appear as needing reviewing once that time has passed so content isn’t forgotten about and it ensures you review your content regularly to ensure it is still valuable, relevant and accurate.