The Contributor's Role

As a site contributor, your role is to add content to the Web site and update it, as necessary. You might be updating a portion of a web page, several web pages, a section, or the entire site. Once the site is created, the designer or manager will notify you of the web pages that must be updated (possibly by using e-mail notifications or workflows).

Before you begin, you should learn as much as possible about the Web site that you will be contributing to. For example, you should:

• Become familiar with the site. Is it a departmental site, an internal site, a public site? How is the site structured? Where are things located?

• Learn about the current style and formatting choices for the site. Does your organization use a style guide to enforce consistency with word use, sentence structure, and the like?

• Find out what part of the site you are responsible for and see if you will be sharing that responsibility with other contributors. Your organization may choose to implement workflow functionality to assist with this process.

• Find out what type of content is used on the site. Does the site consist of Site Studio data files, native documents, images, and video? You edit data files with Contributor, and you edit native documents with the application used to create those files (for example, Microsoft Word for files with the .doc extension).

You can then start making changes directly to the site using Site Studio Contributor. You can make changes and preview those changes before updating the site. Your changes will be saved in a file (called a contributor data file) that is stored on the content server (see Getting Started With Contributor and Editing Web Pages in Contributor). Alternatively, you can create and edit native documents (such as Microsoft Word files), which are converted into web pages that appear on the Web site (see Working With Native Documents).