⧉Symbols, releases and editorial plan

A section that you maintain once and use on several pages. A change takes effect everywhere it appears.

Typical cases:

• The contact block with address, phone number and opening hours.
• A club’s donation appeal.
• The note about the emergency service.
• A team section that appears on several service pages.

The benefit only shows later: when the phone number changes, you change one place instead of seven, and the eighth one you would have forgotten does not exist.

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Under Symbols, create a new one, name it and fill it with blocks — just like a page, only without its own address.

Then you insert it on a page using the Symbol block type and select it.

On naming: name it after its content, not its position. “Contact block” is a good name, “Section at the bottom” is not — otherwise, by the fifth symbol at the latest, you will no longer know which is which.

A symbol can be duplicated. That is the quickest route to a variant that is almost, but not quite, the same.

The change takes effect on all pages where it is used — that is the point of it and at the same time the danger.

Two things follow from this:

• Check where it appears before changing it. A symbol you adjust for the home page may look wrong on the contact page.
• The change still only becomes visible when you publish. A draft stays a draft, symbols included.

If you need a deviation in just one place, the right way is: duplicate the symbol, adjust the copy, insert the copy on that one page. Not: change the shared symbol and repair the other pages afterwards.

From the third use onwards. With two places, changing is quicker than creating; from three it tips over, and from five it is the difference between maintained and out of date.

There is a second threshold that has nothing to do with the number: when a piece of information is going to change. A phone number, a contact person, a price, an opening-hours block — that belongs in a symbol, even if it only appears in two places. Purely decorative elements that never change do not need one.

What you should not turn into a symbol: the hero of the home page or other one-off sections. A symbol with exactly one use is a detour.

It disappears from all pages where it had been inserted — a gap remains there, not a replacement.

Before deleting: check where it is used. If you are not sure, it is safer to stop inserting it and leave it in place. An unused symbol costs nothing.

The difference from removing it on a page: there you only take out the insertion. The symbol itself remains and continues to appear on the other pages.

A bundle of changes that go live together — also on a schedule.

The problem it solves: a redesign rarely affects only one page. New service page, adjusted navigation, changed home page, new image in the footer. If you publish these one after another, visitors see a state in between that is half old and half new — with links that still lead nowhere.

A release combines all of this and switches it over in one go.

You do not need this for everyday work: anyone correcting a text simply publishes. Releases pay off for redesigns, promotions with a fixed date, and wherever several people work together.

Create a release, name it, then add the pages concerned. After that you work as usual; at the end, everything is published together.

On naming: something that will still make sense in three months. “New service pages autumn” is good, “Changes” is not.

Practical procedure:

1. Create the release.
2. Add all the pages concerned — one too many rather than one too few.
3. Work at your own pace, for as long as it takes.
4. Check the preview, ideally having someone else proofread it.
5. Publish.

What is easily forgotten: symbols also belong in the release if they have been changed as well.

Yes. A release can be scheduled for a point in time and then goes live by itself.

What this is good for:

• Promotions with a fixed date — the summer price that is meant to apply from 1 June.
• Announcements that fit an event.
• Redesigns outside business hours, so that nobody is on the site in the middle of the switch.

Two notes:

• Check beforehand. After the scheduled time nobody looks any more; if something is not right then, it stays like that for days.
• Do not schedule for Friday evening. If something does go wrong, nobody notices before Monday.

What has been published is published — there is no button that turns back time. What helps:

• Restore the previous state by changing the pages concerned back and publishing again. That is manual work and takes longer than rolling it out did.
• In a real emergency — something wrong or unlawful is publicly visible — take the page concerned out of the navigation immediately and empty it.

The real lesson follows from this: the check takes place beforehand. That is exactly why a release is a bundle: so that there is a clear moment at which someone takes one more look.

Scheduled and published pages and posts in a calendar view. It answers two questions at a glance: What appeared when? and What is coming up?

Its benefit lies less in planning than in seeing. If nothing has appeared for eleven weeks, you notice it in the calendar immediately — in a list you do not.

Who it is worthwhile for:

• Clubs with a rhythm of events.
• Businesses that blog regularly.
• Several people who contribute content and should not get in each other’s way.

Anyone who changes an opening time twice a year does not need it.

The one you can still manage in the worst month — not the one you resolve to keep in January.

As a guide:

• One post a month is a good, sustainable pace for a small business.
• Quarterly is also fine if the posts have substance.
• Weekly is something nobody manages on the side. Anyone who resolves to do it gives up after six weeks — and a blog whose last post is a year old does harm.

The better way: produce in advance. Write three posts on a quiet afternoon and spread them across the calendar. Then the three carry you through a quarter.

From the year itself. Almost every business has a rhythm that it only needs to write down:

• Season. What happens in spring, what in autumn? Boiler servicing, garden maintenance, winter tyres, Christmas trade.
• Recurring questions. What are you asked in March, what in October? Every frequent question is a post.
• Your own dates. Company anniversary, new member of staff, new machine, move.
• Clubs: general meeting, festivities, campaigns, annual report.

Write twelve keywords into the calendar — one per month. That is the whole editorial plan, and it is better than any more elaborate method because it has been thought through to the end.

Not as a text snippet within a paragraph — reuse works at the level of blocks.

In practice this is rarely a problem, because the things that repeat are separate sections anyway: contact details, opening hours, a notice.

Where it does get in the way — for example a price that appears in three running texts — a different approach helps: state the figure in only one place and link to it from the others. That is not only less maintenance, but also easier to read than the same information three times.

The rule of thumb behind it: anything that can change belongs on the website exactly once.

No. Symbols belong to one website — just like pages, images and forms.

That is intentional: two websites are two presences, often for two businesses or two target groups. A shared symbol would mean that a change to one site alters another without anyone having thought about it.

If you need the same content on two sites: copy it. For agencies that look after many customer sites, the usual route is a different one — there you build one site the way it should be and create new customers based on that model.

By way of duplicating, yes, and in practice that is enough:

1. Build a page the way your standard page should look.
2. Take it out of the navigation and do not publish it.
3. Call it, for example, “Template service page”.
4. For every new service page: duplicate, rename, set the address, fill it.

That is the pragmatic route to consistent pages, and it has a side effect: the template shows you which blocks you consider sensible, and you notice when a real page deviates from it.

Do not forget never to publish the template itself.

With a twenty-minute round every six months:

• Symbols: is each one still used? Anything that has not appeared anywhere for a year can go.
• Pages: are there pages that nobody visits and nobody links to?
• Media library: images that belonged to deleted pages.
• Forms: forms whose entries nobody reads any more.
• Releases: old, completed bundles.

The point is not the storage saved, but the overview. A symbol list with four entries gets used; one with forty gets avoided, and then someone starts maintaining sections individually again.

Note down the date. Next time you will know how long it has been.