WordPress content management: Better media control

There’s a good reason why one in four websites are built with WordPress. The platform is so robust with CMS tools and features that it’s effectively dominated the playing field for web content creation. WordPress has practically become synonymous with “content management”, since it allows even non-tech savvy users to build a great site. For marketers who create content and need to get their media on their website, WordPress is indispensable.

But for all that WordPress does and does well, like providing plenty of support and playing nicely with Google, there are some things that it just wasn’t designed for. For a better idea of what it lacks, consider a typical flow for the content lifecycle:

• Plan – Figuring out how proposed content can be successful by examining business goals and measuring analytics
• Develop – Creating content and converting it to its proper channels
• Control – Storing, organizing, reviewing, and approving content
• Deploy – Assembling content for publishing
• Preserve – Archiving, backing up, migrating, and destroying content when necessary
• Evaluate – Measuring and analyzing content performance to influence planning

WordPress’s strengths are in the “Deploy” phase, where content is assembled, personalized and published. That critical need of deploying a site is the platform’s main focus. Not many other CMS systems handle that phase quite as well as WordPress, but focusing squarely on deployment does stage a concern: what’s to be done about controlling and preserving all the media on a WordPress site?

A common misconception with WordPress is that, since it can store digital assets in its media library, it’s a proper system for storing and managing media. Smart marketers figure out that folly quickly: WordPress simply wasn’t designed as a media library. It’s storage feature is functional and allows users to do a basic search for their media, but for dealing with the more complex aspects in the “Control” and “Preserve” phases? Even the best CMS is lacking on that front.

Thank goodness then for WordPress’s excellent extensibility and love for plugins, because a digital asset management (DAM) solution that integrates with WordPress takes care of that need for better media control. A DAM that connects directly with WordPress’s media library provides the missing organization, approval review, back up and even reporting analytics for your site’s content.

The right DAM can even enhance the publishing done on WordPress. It will still guarantee that all media is hosted locally, so even though it’s better organized and managed, you’ll still be reaping all of the SEO benefits. It will also speed up the process of getting media files to publish: you can work directly from cloud-to-cloud without relying on emails or desktop folders to transfer files. A good DAM will auto-populate alt tags too, so you’ll never have to worry about invalid tags and broken images.