Web Publication Characteristics

A web site, unlike a print publication, does not have a fixed number of pages, and disk storage is so cheap that there is no practical limit to content. An Escenic publication, like most large, active web sites will therefore usually have far more content than is immediately visible, like an iceberg that is mostly hidden below the surface of the water. If you are used to web publishing then this is probably obvious; if you come from a print publishing background then it may not be. It is useful to keep this aspect of web publishing in mind when learning to use Content Studio.

Nothing you add to the publication using Content Studio is ever deleted. Content Studio has a kind of delete function, but all it does is mark a content item as deleted, so that it will no longer be returned by searches. It is still there, and can be restored at any time. Normally, however, articles are not deleted, with the result that the publication grows in size year by year. In this sense, a web publication is like a print publication plus its archives. What readers see on the section pages of the publication corresponds approximately to the "current issue" of a paper publication, but all the articles they can't see there are still accessible in a variety of ways:

• Through links to related articles

• Through the publication's search function

• Through external search engines such as Google

When you work with the section pages in Content Studio, all you are doing is determining how much exposure various articles will get. If you remove an article summary from a section page, you haven't deleted the article from the publication, just made it harder for readers to find.

The other aspect of this is that you have access to the whole publication when working in Content Studio. When writing an article on a particular subject you can use Content Studio's search function to find all previous articles on the same subject and make use of them: read them as background, copy text from them or include links to them in your article.