Editing your website content

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It is important to think about how web content gets updated when setting out on any website project.

Not too long ago a web/content editor might have opened their text editor make some changes and upload them using ftp, or connect directly to the server and update the file. But this does leave an audit trail and we believe that all business processes should be written down, trackable and repeatable.

If the website project uses Git from the start to provide version control then you get a trackable history of who did what and when.

So this means that we might be editing content stored under version control for example on GitHub. So what are our options?

Direct Editing

We could use github.dev web-editor which provides us with the HTML to edit and commit back to GitHub which might start our deployment pipeline to put the changes onto our website.

This means we do not need to install anything on our machine, just open a browser tab and go. Giving you the freedom to work anywhere even on tablets and Chromebooks. You would need to know a little HTML & CSS to make changes but this is very teachable, the rest is a bit like using a word processor.

Online Web form

You might use a web form that is part of a Git based CMS.

Here you would only need to learn the steps needed to use the CMS, though publishing may be automatic. You will need to make sure that the CMS is updated as well.

Static Site Generator

If you are using a Static Site Generator you might make updates and changes to a Markdown file and then the generator takes this new content and rebuilds the deployable site.

Here you might only need to know Markdown but to add new features you might need to know JavaScript or the template language that the Static Site Generator uses. You will need to make sure to update the Static Site Generator and its dependencies as well.

Headless CMS

You might use a web form from a Headless CMS that then connects to a Static Site Generator.

Here you would only need to learn the steps needed to use the CMS, though Static Site Generator publishing may be automatic. you would need to make sure to update the Static Site Generator and CMS plus their dependencies as well.

Fully Managed

A fully Managed option, you file a change request and someone else updates the site for you.

We have only covered a few options here to give a little idea of what the edit update loop might look like. but we have not outlined working with images and how they are optimized, this could be a manual or automatic task though this depends on how the site is being built. If you choose to use a Static Site Generator or CMS it is best to look at images and template update on a per project basis.