Change does not necessarily equal quality

The key to a successful website is to change the content on your website as often as possible. right?

Change can be a dangerous notion on a website, and is something that is made easy and readily available by drupal and other CMS systems. But you must remember that arbitrary change for the sake of change serves no function. And can hurt your website, by disorienting users, and hurt your search engine rankings as well.

The change dilemma often comes especially when someone is new to a CMS system and starts publishing their own content. When you first start out with drupal for instancee one of the first things users want to do is edit all the content that is available to edit on the site. And this behavior is perfectly acceptble, in fact I heartily recommend that you customize your drupal site to suit yourself and your needs. The trouble comes with the default model of having two content types: the page and the story

Problem: Users want to update their content.
Solution: User installs a CMS (such as drupal)
Failure: User doesn't understand the best way to engage users with a consistant behavior.

This problem stems from the inability to tell the difference between these two content types. What is story content? What is page content? These two terms are confusing to users and here is why.

A lot of beginning drupal users are new to the world of creating their own content. Often in the past they would send their content to a design studio to have it put in the template, or they would put it on the page themselves with one of the plethora of wysiwyg html editing applications. For these users a CMS is a new experience, and there are little or no classes on writing for the web anyhow.

These users because of their previous knowledge and how they are used to doing things will have a mental model of drupal which is more in line with the page concept. That is these users think in terms of one page which is to be updated instead of the story concept of a string of interrelated pages which chronologically tell a narrative about the website, and the website's content.

The story concept is new to them, and is the same concept as a blog. Because of this lack of grasping this concept the user doesn't think about the consequences of altering these story nodes. What ends up happening then, is a rewritten history which ultimately shows change, but it shows change in such a way that the user is disoriented

When a user has no clear idea of the nature of the event and in its place sees only a recap or congratulations in it's place they are disoriented

Instead of disorienting the user, we should not be supplanting old information with the new, but instead linking through old information to an update, or at the very least including the old text along with the new text when updating. Though I must stress that I highly recommend creating a new page instead if for no other reason than those people reading your content through a feed reader will most likely not see your edits. With a new post you will bring this updated information right back up to the forefront of their reading queue