Hit me with your best content revamp practices
March 29, 2017 8:43 AM Subscribe
Hello hive mind, especially those with project management expertise! I am at the starting line of a quick, three-month sprint to revamp a large website. I am looking for your best practices, tools, tips, and tricks for managing the process(es) to get from "terrible, ancient, overgrown website" to "well structured information" -- not at the information architecture or navigational levels but in terms of getting the best content on each page. More details within.
We have more than 5 major business units, more than 15 product lines, several international audiences, some of our content is only useful locally, and currently we have a massive number of pages and pages and page of information that in some cases is repetitive, inconsistent, and out-of-date. We have very little visual storytelling and our tech has been out of date for a while, so people's thinking is still kind of stuck in a kind of print-first world.
This content will be redeveloped by a combination of an external agency, a design agency, internal stakeholders and the organizational marketing team. It will be ending up in a fresh Drupal 8 installation.
What I need help with is how you have managed a flow of execution from identifying key messages through writing, visuals development, and approval of brand new webpages. Is there a killer tool for this? (We have Asana, Trello, and a very nascent version of Jira.) Have you found an amazing way to sort large chunks of information to make sure all the key points are covered while completely redoing both the architecture and the actual language both in terms of copy and visuals?
No one in the organization has a lot of experience with this kind of reboot. We have people with deep subject matter expertise, it's more how do you handle the flow of information.
Thanks in advance for your help!
We have more than 5 major business units, more than 15 product lines, several international audiences, some of our content is only useful locally, and currently we have a massive number of pages and pages and page of information that in some cases is repetitive, inconsistent, and out-of-date. We have very little visual storytelling and our tech has been out of date for a while, so people's thinking is still kind of stuck in a kind of print-first world.
This content will be redeveloped by a combination of an external agency, a design agency, internal stakeholders and the organizational marketing team. It will be ending up in a fresh Drupal 8 installation.
What I need help with is how you have managed a flow of execution from identifying key messages through writing, visuals development, and approval of brand new webpages. Is there a killer tool for this? (We have Asana, Trello, and a very nascent version of Jira.) Have you found an amazing way to sort large chunks of information to make sure all the key points are covered while completely redoing both the architecture and the actual language both in terms of copy and visuals?
No one in the organization has a lot of experience with this kind of reboot. We have people with deep subject matter expertise, it's more how do you handle the flow of information.
Thanks in advance for your help!
I think you should look at Gather Content or SlickPlan.
posted by Medieval Maven at 9:15 AM on March 29, 2017
posted by Medieval Maven at 9:15 AM on March 29, 2017
Also, additional two cents:
with the size and complexity and probably varying levels of savviness with kanban systems w/in that team -- I think Trello is not robust enough, FWIW. Gather Content and Slickplan are much more oriented specifically to the tasks you are describing.
posted by Medieval Maven at 9:17 AM on March 29, 2017
with the size and complexity and probably varying levels of savviness with kanban systems w/in that team -- I think Trello is not robust enough, FWIW. Gather Content and Slickplan are much more oriented specifically to the tasks you are describing.
posted by Medieval Maven at 9:17 AM on March 29, 2017
I am at the starting line of a quick, three-month sprint to revamp a large website.
---
This content will be redeveloped by a combination of an external agency, a design agency, internal stakeholders and the organizational marketing team.
---
currently we have a massive number of pages and pages and page of information that in some cases is repetitive, inconsistent, and out-of-date.
---
No one in the organization has a lot of experience with this kind of reboot.
I'm not answering the question here, but I've worked on a website migration project - about 1,100 pages and 12,000 other pieces of content. It isn't exactly what you're doing, but it took nine months of absolute grinding to get it done, and that was with effectively zero content refactoring.
I'm guessing by your question that you've already asked and answered these questions, but if I was taking this on, I would ask:
* How much content do you have?
* How long does it take to refactor/rewrite, say three pages of content or a single topic into one? If it's two hours, and you have 5,000 pages of content, you 'd need ~3,400 hours (85 work weeks) just to rewrite content. You also need hours for site design, structure, navigation, search, actually getting the content into the CMS, etc.
* Who is actually entering/migrating the content? How fast can a straight migration, without refactoring, be done? Again, multiply hours/topics/pages here.
* Are you doing a site redesign at the same time?
* How much time are the internal stakeholders going to dedicate to this?
* Is the content very general in nature (sales and marketing oriented) or very specific in nature (support, instructions and so on?)
* Will the organization be damaged by having incomplete or incorrect content on the website?
* Are the stakeholders going to have direct access to make the corrections that are almost certain to be needed over the following six months?
If you have thousands or tens of thousands of pages and files to refactor, I don't see how something like Trello is going to help you all that much. It doesn't look like it scales well to tens of thousands of items. Asana seems like it might be better.
Depending on the type of content you have, I'd probably start with a simple page/content list. Then I'd break that down into a topic list and consider making relationship diagrams between pages and topics. That way you can see every piece of content that relates to a single topic. This will also help you with 301 redirects from your old pages/content to your new content. If you don't do redirects, your site is going to suffer for SEO. Then I'd read through the existing content and distill that down into the simple, single source for that topic/subtopic. Identify which topics need refactoring and which don't.
Your other challenge is going to be content that's in PDF format. You'll have to track down the source documents to rewrite those, and if you're looking at thousands or tens of thousands of documents, that's a major challenge, to say the least.
Only when you've identified all of your topics/subtopics do you bring in another tool to track topic progress, like Trello, Asana or possibly a discussion board, relationship diagrams, wiki (MediaWiki with comments?), or some sort of multiuser mindmap . This is an ugly, slow process to really do it right. Three months seems unrealistic.
On the other hand, your strategy might just be to throw everything away and rewrite each topic from scratch.
Come up with your list of 100 or 500 or 5,000 topics and subtopics and just write them from the ground up using one of the tools above. Again though, depending on your scale and how many resources you're willing to dedicate, this could be relatively simple (50 topics!) or absolutely terrible (5,000 topics).
Unless the external agency is an expert in your field, they're likely to know nothing about your content. Additionally, they should be assigning a project manager to your project and have had experience doing content refactoring. This should be a question for them, more than for us. If they haven't done this kind of thing repeatedly, I would question their value. If they haven't brought up the issues I have, or don't have ideas on how you manage this, I would really question their value.
I think my basic approach just on writing topics, and not overall project tracking or anything else, might be:
1. You need a PM whose job it is just to keep track of what's been done with every topic, whether that's 50 topics or 5,000.
2. Identify topics/subtopics to be written.
3. Relationship diagram topics/subtopics
4. Read existing content (or throw it away)
5. Run MediaWiki (or another wiki) with comments
6. Structure topics/subtopics in the way they'll be seen on the website
7. Use a combination of Wiki pages and comments on those pages to rewrite topics.
8. Rewrite the topics into a single, long page where possible, with subtopics as subpages, then separate the topic itself into multiple pages as needed when content is complete.
I think there might be an answer to your question in there somewhere, and I certainly don't expect you to reply to my myriad of questions, but the words "large website," "no experience" and "three months" fired up my Spidey sense.
Good luck!
posted by cnc at 9:54 AM on March 29, 2017 [8 favorites]
---
This content will be redeveloped by a combination of an external agency, a design agency, internal stakeholders and the organizational marketing team.
---
currently we have a massive number of pages and pages and page of information that in some cases is repetitive, inconsistent, and out-of-date.
---
No one in the organization has a lot of experience with this kind of reboot.
I'm not answering the question here, but I've worked on a website migration project - about 1,100 pages and 12,000 other pieces of content. It isn't exactly what you're doing, but it took nine months of absolute grinding to get it done, and that was with effectively zero content refactoring.
I'm guessing by your question that you've already asked and answered these questions, but if I was taking this on, I would ask:
* How much content do you have?
* How long does it take to refactor/rewrite, say three pages of content or a single topic into one? If it's two hours, and you have 5,000 pages of content, you 'd need ~3,400 hours (85 work weeks) just to rewrite content. You also need hours for site design, structure, navigation, search, actually getting the content into the CMS, etc.
* Who is actually entering/migrating the content? How fast can a straight migration, without refactoring, be done? Again, multiply hours/topics/pages here.
* Are you doing a site redesign at the same time?
* How much time are the internal stakeholders going to dedicate to this?
* Is the content very general in nature (sales and marketing oriented) or very specific in nature (support, instructions and so on?)
* Will the organization be damaged by having incomplete or incorrect content on the website?
* Are the stakeholders going to have direct access to make the corrections that are almost certain to be needed over the following six months?
If you have thousands or tens of thousands of pages and files to refactor, I don't see how something like Trello is going to help you all that much. It doesn't look like it scales well to tens of thousands of items. Asana seems like it might be better.
Depending on the type of content you have, I'd probably start with a simple page/content list. Then I'd break that down into a topic list and consider making relationship diagrams between pages and topics. That way you can see every piece of content that relates to a single topic. This will also help you with 301 redirects from your old pages/content to your new content. If you don't do redirects, your site is going to suffer for SEO. Then I'd read through the existing content and distill that down into the simple, single source for that topic/subtopic. Identify which topics need refactoring and which don't.
Your other challenge is going to be content that's in PDF format. You'll have to track down the source documents to rewrite those, and if you're looking at thousands or tens of thousands of documents, that's a major challenge, to say the least.
Only when you've identified all of your topics/subtopics do you bring in another tool to track topic progress, like Trello, Asana or possibly a discussion board, relationship diagrams, wiki (MediaWiki with comments?), or some sort of multiuser mindmap . This is an ugly, slow process to really do it right. Three months seems unrealistic.
On the other hand, your strategy might just be to throw everything away and rewrite each topic from scratch.
Come up with your list of 100 or 500 or 5,000 topics and subtopics and just write them from the ground up using one of the tools above. Again though, depending on your scale and how many resources you're willing to dedicate, this could be relatively simple (50 topics!) or absolutely terrible (5,000 topics).
Unless the external agency is an expert in your field, they're likely to know nothing about your content. Additionally, they should be assigning a project manager to your project and have had experience doing content refactoring. This should be a question for them, more than for us. If they haven't done this kind of thing repeatedly, I would question their value. If they haven't brought up the issues I have, or don't have ideas on how you manage this, I would really question their value.
I think my basic approach just on writing topics, and not overall project tracking or anything else, might be:
1. You need a PM whose job it is just to keep track of what's been done with every topic, whether that's 50 topics or 5,000.
2. Identify topics/subtopics to be written.
3. Relationship diagram topics/subtopics
4. Read existing content (or throw it away)
5. Run MediaWiki (or another wiki) with comments
6. Structure topics/subtopics in the way they'll be seen on the website
7. Use a combination of Wiki pages and comments on those pages to rewrite topics.
8. Rewrite the topics into a single, long page where possible, with subtopics as subpages, then separate the topic itself into multiple pages as needed when content is complete.
I think there might be an answer to your question in there somewhere, and I certainly don't expect you to reply to my myriad of questions, but the words "large website," "no experience" and "three months" fired up my Spidey sense.
Good luck!
posted by cnc at 9:54 AM on March 29, 2017 [8 favorites]
Adding - there is almost certainly a better approach to content refactoring than the one I describe above. I've never done that specifically, but your agency should have, and they should have some ideas about that approach.
posted by cnc at 10:09 AM on March 29, 2017
posted by cnc at 10:09 AM on March 29, 2017
>terrible, ancient, overgrown website" to "well structured information"
The "massive number of pages" appears to be the most difficult-to-digest nugget you have to deal with.
For each of those pages, I would require the internal stakeholders write a one sentence description of the information (metadata). The metadata should include a structured indication of repetition (by identifying the other pages with overlap), inconsistency (by identifying the other pages with which this text is inconsistent), or out-of-dateness (by indicating what documents, if any, supersede the current one).
After metadata has been completed, I would get the internal stakeholders and the organizational marketing team, using the metadata, to identify the page content that is needed in the final website, as well as to generate metadata for new material required.
You now have a catalog of the new content, outside of the design and presentation elements, and can decide whether cut and hammer the surviving content, or to write anew, using the old material as a reference.
Since you already have a deadline, this triage process by the stakeholders and organizational marketing team needs a deadline, too. This triage should be design-to-cost and incremental (you have access to whatever metadata they have generated at any time), and runs concurrently with the design of the information on the site, so that as the triage proceeds, likely triage survivors can inform the site design, and site design can direct the triage effort.
Triage is tracked by percentage of old website content that has been assigned metadata. Some aspects of the metadata (the meta-metadata such as inconsistency/duplication/obsolescence) will become more accurate as more metadata is generated.
On preview, rather a lot like what CNC said.
posted by the Real Dan at 10:29 AM on March 29, 2017 [4 favorites]
The "massive number of pages" appears to be the most difficult-to-digest nugget you have to deal with.
For each of those pages, I would require the internal stakeholders write a one sentence description of the information (metadata). The metadata should include a structured indication of repetition (by identifying the other pages with overlap), inconsistency (by identifying the other pages with which this text is inconsistent), or out-of-dateness (by indicating what documents, if any, supersede the current one).
After metadata has been completed, I would get the internal stakeholders and the organizational marketing team, using the metadata, to identify the page content that is needed in the final website, as well as to generate metadata for new material required.
You now have a catalog of the new content, outside of the design and presentation elements, and can decide whether cut and hammer the surviving content, or to write anew, using the old material as a reference.
Since you already have a deadline, this triage process by the stakeholders and organizational marketing team needs a deadline, too. This triage should be design-to-cost and incremental (you have access to whatever metadata they have generated at any time), and runs concurrently with the design of the information on the site, so that as the triage proceeds, likely triage survivors can inform the site design, and site design can direct the triage effort.
Triage is tracked by percentage of old website content that has been assigned metadata. Some aspects of the metadata (the meta-metadata such as inconsistency/duplication/obsolescence) will become more accurate as more metadata is generated.
On preview, rather a lot like what CNC said.
posted by the Real Dan at 10:29 AM on March 29, 2017 [4 favorites]
I make my living doing large web projects. What CNC and the Real Dan have said are spot on.
We have more than 5 major business units, more than 15 product lines, several international audiences, some of our content is only useful locally, and currently we have a massive number of pages and pages and page of information that in some cases is repetitive, inconsistent, and out-of-date. We have very little visual storytelling and our tech has been out of date for a while, so people's thinking is still kind of stuck in a kind of print-first world.
No one in the organization has a lot of experience with this kind of reboot.
You're rewriting all the content and throwing some out (which means, yes, you need to examine the information architecture), updating the brand with new visuals, possibly adding new original photography, updating some kind of technology, and implementing a new content management system that needs to be customized? If "massive number of pages" equates to anything like 5000 or above, for a design/dev/content team of let's say 5-8 people including a PM, working 40-hour weeks, this is at least a 9-month gig. Which I would only estimate for a team with experience doing this kind of overhaul. And even then, I'd be realistic about how little time the stakeholders would devote to writing new content, and how the project would stretch by at least a couple of months of chasing them down. Which would, frankly, give my team breathing room to complete everything because 9 months would have been an aggressive timeline.
I worry from your wording that you think there's a product that can help you do this in three months. I would instead suggest reading a book or two on creating and operationalizing a content strategy (like this one or this one) and do some reading on large web projects such as this or this or this article on content strategy for large sites and then I'd be researching the top large sites that use Drupal to gather ideas
posted by ImproviseOrDie at 12:09 PM on March 29, 2017 [1 favorite]
We have more than 5 major business units, more than 15 product lines, several international audiences, some of our content is only useful locally, and currently we have a massive number of pages and pages and page of information that in some cases is repetitive, inconsistent, and out-of-date. We have very little visual storytelling and our tech has been out of date for a while, so people's thinking is still kind of stuck in a kind of print-first world.
No one in the organization has a lot of experience with this kind of reboot.
You're rewriting all the content and throwing some out (which means, yes, you need to examine the information architecture), updating the brand with new visuals, possibly adding new original photography, updating some kind of technology, and implementing a new content management system that needs to be customized? If "massive number of pages" equates to anything like 5000 or above, for a design/dev/content team of let's say 5-8 people including a PM, working 40-hour weeks, this is at least a 9-month gig. Which I would only estimate for a team with experience doing this kind of overhaul. And even then, I'd be realistic about how little time the stakeholders would devote to writing new content, and how the project would stretch by at least a couple of months of chasing them down. Which would, frankly, give my team breathing room to complete everything because 9 months would have been an aggressive timeline.
I worry from your wording that you think there's a product that can help you do this in three months. I would instead suggest reading a book or two on creating and operationalizing a content strategy (like this one or this one) and do some reading on large web projects such as this or this or this article on content strategy for large sites and then I'd be researching the top large sites that use Drupal to gather ideas
posted by ImproviseOrDie at 12:09 PM on March 29, 2017 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: Thank you so much everyone! I am reading and reflecting and looking at tools. And I appreciate very much your expertise and in a slightly backwards way, your validation.
cnc, you've nailed a lot of the challenges - and your spidey sense is bang on, it's going to be a pretty wild ride. We have done a good chunk of the documenting and pruning, but - today had a lot of surprise information around refactoring!
ImproviseOrDie Thank you for the links! I don't control the timeframe or the expectations, and I know there's not a product that can solve those two things and I share your underlying concern. I have a content strategy background but not in an organization where there haven't been content processes for years and years. I may give those books out as spring gifts to everyone.
I'll update this question in August to let everyone know how we're doing!
posted by warriorqueen at 12:34 PM on March 29, 2017
cnc, you've nailed a lot of the challenges - and your spidey sense is bang on, it's going to be a pretty wild ride. We have done a good chunk of the documenting and pruning, but - today had a lot of surprise information around refactoring!
ImproviseOrDie Thank you for the links! I don't control the timeframe or the expectations, and I know there's not a product that can solve those two things and I share your underlying concern. I have a content strategy background but not in an organization where there haven't been content processes for years and years. I may give those books out as spring gifts to everyone.
I'll update this question in August to let everyone know how we're doing!
posted by warriorqueen at 12:34 PM on March 29, 2017
Agreed with everyone above, but I did want to point out this tool for doing a content audit on your site. I've used the free trial for overhauling one small section of our website and it was useful. Your existing website CMS should be able to export a list of pages for you but the integration with google analytics and screenshots might be of use for you. I'm also part of a content strategy LinkedIn group that might have some old discussions or you could post a new one that could help with finding other tools/best practices.
[I just deleted a couple paragraphs about past and current website overhauls I've done as an in-house digital/content strategist with a large, sometimes technical, and often outdated website, because it looks like you know what a bear this will be. So instead I will just wish you godspeed and good luck!]
posted by misskaz at 12:52 PM on March 29, 2017 [1 favorite]
[I just deleted a couple paragraphs about past and current website overhauls I've done as an in-house digital/content strategist with a large, sometimes technical, and often outdated website, because it looks like you know what a bear this will be. So instead I will just wish you godspeed and good luck!]
posted by misskaz at 12:52 PM on March 29, 2017 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
We've got a Trello board set up with columns for each of the major stages a piece of content has to go through before it's ready to be published (our columns are: to write, writing, needs review, ready to publish). Right now the person who's volunteered/been assigned to write an article on a particular topic (these are already well-defined from a backlog; you might need a separate process to get from "big pile of potential stuff" to "scoped ideas we can make content from") creates the topic card and adds anyone else who'll be working on it in the early stages, then when they start turning the idea into a page it moves into "writing", then once it's written the writer moves it to the review column, adds a link to the review page and adds me to the Trello card (sometimes they email me as well) so that I'm good and notified. Then I review it, leave a note in the card (which I believe sends an email notification to the people who own it, or at least can be set up to do so) to say I've reviewed it and I'm happy, and then I move it to the publish column and the person who owns it makes the final page & publishes it.
Our project is quite slow-paced (this is nice-to-have stuff that the team are doing around customer support calls), but between the Trello notifications, the process being clear and people generally knowing what's going on, it seems to work. I don't know how well it would scale to the thing you're trying to do, but I think at least a version of what you want is doable within Trello.
posted by terretu at 9:08 AM on March 29, 2017