Manage Your Website Content Production With Ease Using GatherContent

Organizing content on a big site can be a huge undertaking. You’ll need to keep track of content publishing dates while also managing who writes, edits, and approves content.

If you work with a team of writers this process gets even more confusing. And if you try to run it all through WordPress you’ll eventually need an alternative.

GatherContent is an online platform that helps teams organise the production of lots of content for website projects. It’s a content management solution that helps you organize writing, revisions, and publishing times on large projects all from a single dashboard.

Intro To GatherContent

GatherContent helps you manage content for one site, or many sites, and everything is curated together by author and topic into one main dashboard.

This also works real well as a client portal for writing work. If you’re managing a content team this tool will make your life even easier.

And ultimately this is the biggest value offered by GatherContent.

Whether you work with a digital agency or a team of outsourced writers, managing your content is often the biggest bottleneck to productivity. GatherContent is a platform that helps teams organize the production of lots of content spanning many different writers.

It’s the perfect tool for larger websites regardless of the project goal:

• Launching a new website
• Redesigning an old website
• Increasing content output
• Managing dozens of writers
• Working closely with client content(edits, revisions)

Once you dig into the details you’ll realize GatherContent is one of the best tools to save time dealing with bulk content.

Automating With Templates

When you’re working on a big site you’ll often need many writers covering different pages. This usually requires specific guidelines and templates for authors to follow.

And GatherContent lets you define templates that go beyond just written words.

You can actually create CMS-styled templates that blend perfectly into whatever site you’re running. All content can be migrated at the click of a button so you’re not copy/pasting anything.

As of this writing GatherContent supports WordPress, Drupal, ExpressionEngine, and a few other CMS’ to be supported in the near future. Take a peek at the CMS integration page for a full list.

While migrating content over to your site you can even browse a full tree structure diagram showing how individual pages are organized.

With this tree structure you can see which content has been published, which pieces still need editing, and which haven’t even been written yet. It’s all part of the GatherContent system to help you manage large content-heavy web projects.

Templates are the backbone of your entire editing & migration process. Great page templates can save hours of time and you’ll never worry about human error since the content syncing process is totally automated.

Managing Authors

GatherContent truly shines in a team environment where you’re working closely with authors and clients.

From the dashboard you can see everything on a project’s status. This includes recent edits to certain pages and the total amount of content in each category(eg. content in progress, awaiting review, or published).

You can even add your own categories to organize content based on your needs. Sometimes you’ll want to SEO optimize your content so this may be one of the final categories once a writer finishes their draft.

The benefit of GatherContent’s system is that you’re in control of the entire workflow.

You decide how drafts are structured, what’s required for each page, and how they progress down the line through reviews/edits and final approval.

You can even specify author permissions and whether certain writers have authority to edit or leave comments on content they didn’t write.

This way you have an entire team of authors with varying permissions between writing, editing, and commenting.

Using this system you can dish out assignments to divvy up the workload. Some people may be responsible for approving and publishing content while others only need to write a completed draft.

This even includes a scheduling feature where you can set deadlines and share this info with everyone on the team. If one author can’t finish a page in time you can find others who will.

You have to think of GatherContent as more than just an author management system. It’s really a team content management system with a focus on content creation, editing, and publishing.

Working Directly With Clients

If you’re a web designer working on a client project you’ll probably have to deal with content as well. This means adding a lot of new pages into the site and getting client approval before publishing.

If the client needs a lot of new content then it’s much easier to connect into GatherContent and synchronize the whole process.

Clients can also get access to the dashboard so they can read through content and offer critiques on every piece. This way you’re getting client approval before publishing. Much easier than publishing a piece and having the client request minor changes down the line.

With client projects you can grant them permissions to leave comments and approve pages once they’re completed. This way you’re not constantly emailing back-and-forth to get client approval on everything.

You can even setup notifications via email that let everyone know when a new draft is ready. This way the client can peruse content on their time and let you know when it’s ready to go live.

GatherContent is an invaluable tool not just for your own personal websites, but also for larger client projects where many people have a say in the process.

Improving Your Content Workflow

If you write a lot of content and have trouble managing writers then GatherContent is worth trying. It comes with a free 30-day trial period where you can test the features and connect into your site for migrating content.

But as useful as this is, you won’t really understand the benefits until you see it in action!

You can get a GatherContent account for a 30 day free trial, no credit card required, and you’ll get full access to all the features that can radically change your content management workflow.