Updating the blog without being forced to publish every week

A content archive ages unevenly: some pages stay valid for years, others become wrong within a few months. A publishing calendar doesn't distinguish between the two, and that's why it produces work in the wrong place — new pages, while the ones that bring in inquiries say things that are no longer true. Maintenance starts here: separating what ages from what doesn't, and deciding who watches what.

The criterion isn't the date of last publication. It's whether the page still answers, and answers well, the question it exists for.

Two types of content, two kinds of maintenance

The classification is done once across the whole archive, and then assigned to every new page as it's published. It costs a few minutes per page and replaces every future discussion about what to update.

The first two rows are the ones that bring in inquiries and need to be protected. The others are the ones that, if neglected, cost credibility for everything else: a reader who finds an outdated reference stops trusting even the correct pages.

Without an owner, there's no maintenance

A page with no one responsible for it doesn't get updated by anyone: it gets noticed when a customer reports an error. The owner isn't whoever wrote the text, it's whoever notices that reality has changed.

• For a service page, it's whoever sells that service.
• For a technical page, it's whoever does that work.
• For a page that depends on regulations or conditions, it's whoever tracks them within the company.

The review condition should be written as an observable fact, not as a deadline: when the warranty terms change, when we update the price list, when the source publishes the new figure. A deadline only serves as a safety net, for pages nobody would otherwise notice.

Four decisions, not one

Faced with a page that needs attention, there are four options, and the first isn't always the best.

• Update: the question is still good, the answer has aged. Fix the wrong parts and leave the rest.
• Merge: two or three pages answer the same question in different words. You pick the strongest one, bring the useful parts of the others into it, and have the others redirect to it. The signal is that you yourselves don't know which one to send a customer.
• Retire: the question no longer exists, or the page describes something you don't do. Remove it, redirecting whoever arrives to the page that makes sense today. Leaving it there because it's not doing any harm means continuing to give a bad answer to whoever finds it.
• Add: the question isn't covered by any existing page. This is the only case where writing something new is the right move, and it needs to be checked first by searching through what you already have.

A sample editorial log

A sheet with a few columns, updated whenever something gets touched. It serves two purposes: knowing what was done and why, and not reopening the same discussion every time.

The column that matters most is the reason. Without it, six months later nobody remembers whether a change was a substantial correction or just a reread, and you end up redoing work that's already been done.

Updating for real, not just touching up the date

Changing the publication date without changing the content is a trick that doesn't help, and it costs you the one useful piece of information in the log: when that text was last checked.

• Distinguish checked from updated: these are two different events, both should be logged, but only the second one changes the substance.
• When you update, say what changed if the change affects the reader. One line at the bottom is enough, and it builds trust.
• Also check the things that break silently: links to pages that no longer exist, references to services you've stopped offering, examples that cite outdated conditions, images showing screenshots that have changed.
• Verify cited figures by going back to the original source, not to another article that reports them.

What this guide doesn't cover

This guide covers maintaining an archive that already exists. How to choose what to write about when the archive still needs to be built, starting from the doubts customers actually express, is covered in the guide on choosing topics. Who updates the site after delivery, and how content responsibilities are distributed, has its own guide.