As per Wikipedia, Microsite refers to an individual web page or cluster of pages which are meant to function as an auxiliary supplement to a primary website. The Microsite’s main landing page most likely has its own URL.

Microsites are quite effective as information outlet and its use is rising. You could give content authors wide range of freedom on how to create Microsite and what structure they can use. They could use any HTML editor of choice and copy the entire output folder to their Microsite folder on web-server (files including, but limited to images, JS, CSS etc). You point a URL to that folder and you are live! Content authors love this freedom of choosing their own structure, even if they have to comply with certain UI templates, they can still tinker with those templates quite fast.

On one hand this option promotes creativity, on other hand it can lead to stale content/template/message on internet longer than you want. You choose WCM and/or Portal products to help you manage the content life-cycle, so one naturally expect managing Microsites within these products. What happens when you try to manage Microsite using these products, can you still provide same level of freedom to content authors on creating Microsites?

Most of the WCM/Portal products would expect you to create templates and use those templates to deliver the content. If you want to create a new template or change existing ones, it would take time (Product companies may claim otherwise, and even if it is as easy to make template changes in few clicks, how about your governance process and testing the impact of template changes on existing content?). In short, it is not easy to change templates easily and give content authors same level of freedom in creating Microsites. This could create discontentment in content authors towards WCM/Portal tool, as it restricts them to certain existing templates for creating Microsites or makes them wait for the template creation process before they can publish their Microsite.

I have seen many of my clients struggling with this situation, where they have departments who want to rapidly create Microsites for promotions/campaigns and thay don’t want to live within the structure of existing templates. The discussion always boils down to this, IT team would ask how many templates you need and we would provide you the library, and the response would be, we don’t know what all we need, we need to be able to create the Microsites with new templates as we go.

I don’t think there is a perfect solution for this problem, but you can arrive at one which could accommodate majority of creativity requests upfront, but still leave room for one-off situations where you have no option but to allow content to be created on free-form HTML and dropped in web-server. Both sides would have to resist the temptation to follow one or the other route (WCM/Portal Vs. Free Form HTML) for all the Microsites. You would have to create governance process to keep an eye on those sites and regularly review them for their content and message.

While reading a entry ‘ECM is Fun’ by Carl @ TakingAim, I came across Wordle “a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide”. It was quite intriguing, so I ended up creating word cloud using Wordle for my blog as well. It was amazing to see your creativity printed out in a entirely new format. Here was the result:

This made me think about how content authors may feel when they see their content being re-purposed in myriad ways, sometime totally unpredictable. Would they feel proud or frustrated? What about me? I think I will be proud most of the time, probably except when the primary context itself is unrecognizable or spun-around. I create the content with a base context and if you remove that context, its meaning is lost.