Contributors provide the raw content for the site.

Since a site without content is unlikely to be of much interest to visitors, site owners need to make it a priority to be clear where the content is to come from.

Front end - a wide range of interactive content elements such as Guest Books, Forums or Blogs are available, and a number of other extensions such as calendars and news can also be used from the front end.

Other content owners/sources - for example commercial photographers and the owners of copyright texts.

Back end - There is a huge range of front-end extensions which can be dropped into pages as content elements.

These range from the relatively simple - text areas, raw HTML - to complex applications, such as shops. They are usually managed on the basis of a back-end user completing forms relating to the content to be displayed.

While the content of a form changes according to the task, there is consistent layout and methodology across extensions. Extended text areas are usually managed through a WYSIWYG editor which has a similar interface to a word processor, and allows many of the same functions, for example:

• Choice of styles
• graphics
• tables
• links
• on-line spell checking
• cut and paste of text internally and from other applications

Text pasted from external sources is automatically stripped of unwanted tags on saving.

Content can also be imported from Microsoft Office and Open Office files, or as plain text. In the former case, the document can either be displayed as it stands, without the possibility to edit it, or it can be imported into a text content element for further editing.

In this way you can avoid the content-as-downloadable-documents syndrome, which blights many information-based websites.