Content library

What a content library is

A content library is one organised store holding every finished piece of content your business owns, plus the material people keep needing to make more: final documents, photographs, logos in the formats printers and websites each require, approved customer quotes, the current company descriptions, and the briefs behind them. Everything is named in a way that means something and filed where somebody who does not work with it daily can still find it.

It is not a list of your website pages. A list of what is published, where it lives and who owns it is a content inventory, a research document. The library holds the files themselves, including everything that never went on the website: the trade-show handout, the supplier one-pager, the photographs from the shoot two years ago that nobody can locate.

What it saves is the recreation of things that already exist, and that is the whole case for it. A salesperson rewriting a company description because they cannot find the approved one. A designer commissioning a photograph you already paid for. A new employee writing a product sheet that sits in a folder nobody showed them. None of that work appears in a budget, and all of it gets paid for twice.

When you need one

The usual trigger is a third person joining. Two people can hold the location of everything between them; three cannot, and the questions start. Where is the logo, is this the current price list, can I use this photograph of the workshop.

The second trigger is a departure. Somebody leaves and takes the map with them, often the files too, because they sat on a personal drive and nowhere else. The third is a rebrand or a rebuild, where the first job is finding out what you already have, and it takes three weeks.

You do not need this if there is one of you and one folder. A single owner more often needs a plan for keeping the published pages current, which is a content maintenance plan, not a filing system for an audience of one.

What goes in it

• Final pieces. The published version of every page, post, guide, sheet and newsletter, saved as it went out, with its publication date. Drafts stay where drafts live, under revision management.
• Photographs. Your own pictures of your premises, staff and products, at full size, each with a note saying when it was taken, who is in it, and whether you have permission to use it. Undated photographs of former staff are a small, recurring embarrassment.
• Logos and marks. Every version somebody will ask for: colour and single-colour, on light and dark, in the file types a printer needs and the ones a website needs, with a line on which to use when.
• Approved quotes and testimonials. What the customer said, their name and title as they agreed it, the date, and where you may use it. An unapproved quote is not an asset; it is a risk.
• The current boilerplate. The fifty, hundred and two-hundred-word descriptions of the business, dated to their last approval, so nobody writes a fourth version at five o'clock for a directory listing. These come from boilerplate descriptions if you do not have them.
• Briefs and templates. The brief behind each piece, the document templates, the pre-publishing checklist. This is what lets the next piece of the same kind be made without inventing the process again.

What you get

The library itself. Built on a shared drive you own, or in whatever project tool you already use, with a structure a stranger can navigate and a naming rule applied throughout.

Your existing material, sorted into it. Gathered from wherever it is now, duplicates removed, the current version of each thing identified, and anything superseded filed rather than deleted.

A one-page index. What is in the library, where each kind of thing sits, and who to ask if something is missing. Pinned wherever your people will see it.

A short set of rules for keeping it true. Who files a new piece and when, which is at publication rather than eventually, and the annual pass that removes what has gone out of date.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A twenty-four-person commercial landscaping company has four salespeople, an office manager and an owner. Between them they have produced, over six years, around forty documents: capability statements, maintenance-contract sheets, planting guides, two versions of a company profile and a great many photographs of finished sites. All of it sits across personal drives, an old laptop and the office manager's email.

The gathering takes four days and turns up eleven versions of the company description and two complete photo shoots nobody remembered. The sorted library ends with twenty-two current documents, one approved description at each of three lengths, a photo folder organised by site with the year and the client's written permission against each, and nine testimonials with the approval email beside them. The change is not in publishing. It is that a salesperson putting a tender together now spends twenty minutes on it instead of half a day, and stops sending a description of the company that stopped being accurate three years ago.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you produce, who needs it, and where it is currently scattered. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Agreed before anything starts, based on roughly how much material there is.
3. The gathering. Access to the drives, folders and inboxes where things live, and twenty minutes each with the people holding their own copies. This always finds more than expected.
4. The sort. Three to eight working days: duplicates removed, current versions identified, permissions and dates recorded against photographs and quotes.
5. The build and the handover. Structure created, everything filed into it, the index written, and half an hour showing your people where things are and how new work gets added.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, because the work is decided almost entirely by how much material exists and how many places it is hiding in. A three-person business with two drives is a short job; six years of four salespeople is not. The pricing page shows the four ways I work. The number is fixed in writing before anything starts, and if the gathering uncovers far more than the call suggested, I tell you before carrying on.

What happens next

A library nearly always reveals gaps. The commonest is photography: no current pictures of the premises or the staff, fixed by a shoot arranged and art-directed. The second is that half the filed documents are out of date, which is a job for a content maintenance plan giving each a review date. The third is that the live website no longer matches the library, in which case the small site changes bring it back into line. None of that is assumed. The library is complete on its own and it is yours to keep.