We are used to the fact that almost all organizations have introduced their own brand books in order to manage identity and its related activities. Actually, brand books help to categorize actions that must be applied in certain cases, so the brand owners have a quick ‘guide’ on how to present, react and display certain content or events. Even brandbook often contains descriptions about companies’ online assets it is usually restricted to simple color schemes and font usage. This is why in recent periods of time we have often heard about the introduction of brand-books especially for online media. Such ‘guides’ help to build and manage your online content and activities based not only on your brand principles but also usability of online media and best practice scenarios.

While at this point everything seems to be clear and you are already thinking ‘Well, this is something really simple’ – there is a big problem on the horizon. All of the websites contain a lot of independent content blocks displayed by using simple or more complex elements and structure, so the question arises – how do I describe what kind of elements and structures I need to use in specific cases, moreover – how do I manage this information and keep it up to date easily? Having documented scenarios and descriptions of structure is a must, nevertheless, it is hard to explore such a document in case you are looking for a quick solution. As a result, instead of time-saving, you receive additional time-consuming tasks which on one side help you develop your online business according to brand identity, but at the same time keep you away from performing direct tasks.

It is clear enough that we need an additional instrument that helps us manage our online brand book, define the structure of the elements and assets, and of course allow easily edit or adapt existing brand book statements according to the newest standards.

On January 22, 2014, Michael, the CEO of WPBakery, described how you can manage your content efficiently by introducing of Template management system developed by the WPBakery team. The topic described two different approaches that users can take into account in order to improve the workflow of the content management process. Based on his opinion and the problems that are discussed in this post, I would like to introduce you brand new approach for online identity management with WordPress. My idea is to use approaches defined by Michael in order to keep pre-defined ready assets within the Template Management System of WPBakery Page Builder and use them according to your needs and practices described in your documentation.

How does it look from the practical side? Well, first of all, you need to create all of your stated online brand book structure and save it as separate Templates. For example, you can create such templates as ‘Feature Display’, ‘Product review’, ‘Special Offers or Promotion’. When you have such templates up and running you can easily use them in case you need to display additional data. What is really important – you will no longer need to browse through documentation whenever you want to add new information to your website and search for how it should be displayed, as you will already have everything described in templates. Moreover, you will have the possibility to easily change the template if your brand experiences any changes which will save you tons of time and resources.

Hope you will find this approach useful and give it a try with our WPBakery Frontend and Backend Page Builder plugin for WordPress and exclusive addon Templatera.