One of the more obvious challenges involved in maintaining a deep web presence is simply the fact that the web team holds the technical knowledge, while the content managers hold the domain knowledge. This seems obvious, I know, but it can be a tough hurdle to overcome for a large organization. And there is really no quick fix. Often I hear organizations blaming their CMS or other technology issues for the problems they face with putting content on the web. They think they chose the "wrong" CMS, or they think a redesign will fix the issues they have.

But the technology is not the answer, it usually comes down to the implementation. How are you using the technology? Did you take the needs of the organization into consideration when organizing the workflow? How did you tag your content and build your templates? No external consultant can come in and "fix" the website, no new CMS will be able to shortcut this analysis and work. The internal players need to be bought in and use their domain knowledge to construct the appropriate solution. It all takes time and effort from people who may not have the web as their main focus.

One option when dealing with content-rich websites is to create smaller, "micro" sites that highlight a specific issue or audience. This is an especially good idea for large organizations, whose abundance of information may be overwhelming to a new user.

For the American Council on Education's Solutions for Our Future higher education advocacy site, we're designing several micro-sites. SFOF is very rich in information across the higher education spectrum, so creating micro-sites around certain topics such as the environment or healthcare makes a lot of sense. Here are a couple of our designs, created by Daniel, which will be developed using their existing Convio Content Management System: