You’ve selected a content management system, customized it to meet your publishing needs, and applied your desired look and feel. Now, you’re ready to load your site content. Here are a few things to think about for this process.

Who’s going to load the content?
Are you expecting your implementor / developer to load the content? Are they expecting you to? You should sort this out before you begin the project. There are pros and cons to each…

Implementor loads the content

• Pros
• They may be able to get the content loaded more quickly, leading to a faster launch of your site, for various reasons:
• Because of their experience with the system, they may have learned to load content quickly.
• They may utilize a more advanced interface for fast content loading.
• They may automate the content loading process.
• They may be able to get content looking ‘just right’ more easily than you.
• One less thing for you to worry about
• Cons
• Your implementor will not understand the context of your content as well as you do, so they may introduce errors in formatting, or may not highlight the correct things.
• If you are adding meta data, such as keywords to facilitate better searching or author information, you’ll need to supply this to your implementor.

You load the content

• Pros
• There’s no better way to learn a system than through experience. This is your chance to get some serious experience. You can learn the shortcuts (and workarounds).
• By using the system, you’ll really know if it meets your needs. Are you prepared to sign off on the project? A couple days or weeks of using the system will help you know that for sure.
• This gives you another chance to review the content before it goes onto the site.
• You will likely save some money. Developers and implementors will charge for their time to load the content.
• Cons
• If your site is large, and you have limited people available, loading the content may take a long time.
• If you get stuck - run into an error, don’t know how to format something - you could get seriously delayed.

Will content by loaded manually or through automation tools?
If content is being converted from an old system, programming and conversion tools outside of your skill set may be used, limiting your ability to do this task on your own. In my experience, content is most often loaded manually, for the following reasons:

• CMS implementations often coincide with site reorganizations, page layout changes, and content rewrites.
• Content from old systems is often unstructured, uncatalogued, and difficult to automatically convert.
• Content from the old system may contain formatting information that is not suitable for the new system. For example, the old content may be contained in tables or may have font styling applied - approaches that are no longer widely utilized by standards compliant content management systems.