Gerry McGovern brings up an important point this week on the issue facing many web dev departments tasked with maintaining large websites on a razor thin staff.

Attention to content is typically very episodic. Departments get together, decide what will go on the website, pick, pull and drag content from all areas of the company, and maybe even write some original stuff if there's any time, and throw it on the website in a hurculean effort to get it launched. Then it sits. Then more content is added, and it too sits. Why? Because no one has time to review it or update it or remove it because they're so focused on creating more never-to-be-reviewed-again content.

A couple of ideas that you can use...

1. Create a standing web content committee and segment out the content for review at individual times
   
2. Keep detailed analytics on how much the 'fresh content' vs. the 'stale content' are contributing to the goals of the site (i.e. new product information generating the most leads...)
   
3. Track each and every piece of added content, it's author, and the experation date. If there's no expiration date, per se, consider putting a review date on the content to ensure that you review it for terms and concepts that might be relevant at publish time, but will change in the next few months.
   
4. This problem has been solved by many content management software packages such as Hannon Hill who offers powerful content management solutions which provide workflow and time based publishing rules for website content. If you're not using a CMS, consider investing in at least a low level system for high-churn areas of the site.

These ideas are mostly technology based solutions, but at the end of the day, it all comes down to leadership. Someone needs to stay on track and on task to ensure that your customers are seeing the most current and correct content and that your #1 public face to the world is at least as clean and current as your competitor's site.