Should content be tightly templated or should freedom to format be the best policy?

This is an issue that came up for discussion recently in planning a project, its also something that I’ve been through before. Like so many things in web development, there’s no definitive answer to this and each case must be discussed on it’s own merits.

In circumstances where the technical ability of those who will be creating new content is quite low, a heavily templated solution is often best. This restricts the content into pre-approved patterns of formatting and, if required, a pre-set content structure.
The downside to templating is that you can never predict every situation that will arise. Sometimes you have templates for one, two or three images attached to a page but somebody needs to put eight photos from a recent event in there.

In a templated solution, there must be a person or people who have control over what templates and content can be created, otherwise you find yourself creating more and more templates. You may also start finding requests for templates that already exist, it’s just that there are too many to search through to find the right one. I’ve been there and it doesn’t take long to get out of control.

The alternative would appear to be complete freedom in the layout and formatting of web content. This works well if the content creators are technically skilled and understand how to work within guidelines. The downside here is that it only takes one over-enthusiastic dabbler to start to turn your web content into something that looks like “My first AOL homepage”. Again, I’ve been there and it’s not a good use of time to be deleting cut-and-paste javascript snowflake effects from a corporate intranet.

The best solution I’ve used is a halfway house that worked to a certain extent for both types of users. The less technically adept didn’t require too much training and the technically skilled didn’t feel too restricted. In order to preserve the corporate identity, certain elements of every page were global and couldn’t be edited (header, navigation etc.). The main body of the page could be freely edited apart from certain restrictions such as font usage and text sizes. There were a number of pre-defined styles that could be used for headings and subheadings, footnotes etc. These were all designed to fit into the corporate identity.

The result of this solution was that I regained a lot of productive time that previously had been lost to either designing and building templates, or cleaning up amateur HTML.