What is Gather and why are we building it?

Gather aims to scratch an itch which we, Deer Digital, encounter day-to-day: Collecting, Organising and Collaborating with clients on Content.

At it’s core, the web is made up of published Content; text, images, audio & video. And as we know, Google, the information super-highway, does an awesome job of organising and indexing most of it.

Content prior to being published on the web is usually a different story. It lurks within the depths of Word Documents, PDF files, our inboxes, in notebooks, on print-outs or even a combination of all of these. As an agency we increasingly see badly structured, inconsistent and unorganised Content trying to make it’s way into our projects.

Ensuring that Content is the biggest focus when delivering a project can be somewhat tough and difficult to keep on top of. Even with a well thought-out content strategy, physically getting the words that you need to go into a site can be a chore (not to mention actually getting them signed off in the first place).

Unfortunately, in some cases, Content can be an after thought.

When it hits crunch time and projects are nearing production, having organised content is vital. When all hands are on deck to ensure that the content is correctly entered into a CMS, having everything you need in an organised and consistent manner really helps (right, when does that ever happen?).

The real kicker is when you or your team members are scrambling to find specific content for pages, last minute changes are arriving and assets are flying through the air. The process can become incredibly taxing on time and resources.

So, we’re building Gather to help us help ourselves, our clients and hopefully, a few other people and businesses along the way.

Initially, we will:

• Help people to centralise all the content for their website projects
• Create accountability for provision of the final copy and any revisions
• Save time and effort when it comes to migrating content into a CMS
• Keep track of content changes
• Structure the content your web team and the CMS need in a meaningful way.
• Simplify the process of people working together to produce content.
• and finally, make it easy for clients to sign off content.

We believe that Gather will help people and businesses meet the dynamically changing requirements of content organisation and collaboration needed in today’s agile, fast-paced, digital project environment.

We’ll be sharing our journey with you and we’d especially love to hear your thoughts along the way.