We’ve heard it before, content is king. It’s an apt analogy, like a king, content is the most important thing in the kingdom of a website. And when something is that important you must create it with care.
In web design we’re constantly trying to choose the right tool for the job. If you’re looking for a tool to write something, or design something, there are a lot of choices. What sets GatherContent apart is an focus on collaboration, and an understanding of the structure of modern web content.
After using GatherContent for pretty much any amount of time, tracked changes in a word doc being emailed around like wildfire sounds like a punch in the gut. It has an immediate impact on your workflow. GC has a specific place though, it’s a digital tool for digital projects. It shines most when used with larger teams and especially with inter-disciplinary teams.
Collaboration
Without getting into the nuts and bolts, what GC does very well is get the right team members to the right pieces of content. To be accurate, it gives authors and editors the tools to gather those people around the content they need to see. From assigning specific users to a particular piece of content, to looping in users when the status of some content changes, the system keeps collaboration quick and reasonably simple.
Then there’s roles. The most useful feature for the website redesign project we’re currently working on. Roles allowed us to assign certain permission to certain types of users. We used roles to prevent our subject matter experts from writing any content and instead force them to leave comments for authors and editors.
Templates
Templates in GatherContent are flexible. They are flexible in the sort of way many modern CMS’ are taking a field based approach to managing content. Instead of having content creators fight with finicky WYSIWYG’s, administrators have freedom to create their own IA. You can create as many templates as content types you have (like a product or article) and have a bunch of fields within those templates, to represent whatever content you need (like a price or author). GC makes few assumptions about your content, which is a good thing.
What templates can’t quite do yet is represent the many types of content a website might have. You can create a rich text field, plain text, file, or selection (checkbox, radio). Most common needs are covered, but some other fields would be helpful. Date time, dropdown selection, or what would we would found most useful – an association field – someway to connect a piece of content to another piece of content. Connect an author node to an article node, for example.
Organization
People, workflows, history, templates. GC keeps all these things under one roof. A lot of their marketing focuses on how an organization can simplify their process and trash bad processes like word docs, spreadsheets, and email to email communication. They have a point.
Those things don’t work at scale and it’s a much more productive experience when they work together as part of a more comprehensive application. GC is not without it’s organizational faults though. Their built in ’sitemap’ feature wasn’t very useful and didn’t work very well with a high number of pages. It takes some time to understand what it means to ‘assign’ someone to a piece of content and to ‘loop’ someone in. These are the nuances that would apply to any app. Learning curves are expected.
Overall, I would recommend GC to pretty much any type of organization that has more than a couple employees and is working on a content heavy project. As we work on our project we have seen an increase in productivity, and organization and experienced a reduction in mistakes and information loss.
One deterrent for some may be price. You’re looking at least $66/month. For what you get, and the solid customer service, it’s worth it.
