Planning your content migration – a dull but essential task

Migrating the content of a council website can be a pretty intimidating task. The typical local government site will have thousands of pages, pdf downloads and images. Depending on the way you work you might also have a couple of hundred content owners/authors to think about.

Having recently gone through the migration process atSouthwark Council I thought I’d share how we went about it and what we learnt along the way – what worked well and what we would do differently.

To give you an idea of timeframes, we first started planning for content migration in August 2009, carried out the migration in January 2010, did quality checks and rewrites throughout February and then launched the new site at the end of March 2010.

Step 1: Know where you stand

August 2009: The first thing we did was ask our CMS support company to provide us with a spreadsheet listing all the content on the site. We wanted to know:

• Folder structure – how many levels deep did the content go? Where was the bulk of the content located and how many pages were there in total?
• Creation dates and review dates – how long had pages been in existence and when were they last updated?
• Content owners – how many gaps were there in content ownership? How many authors did we have, how many pages did they own and when did they last log in to the CMS?

The findings of this review were that we had:

• 2,630 live pages – of which 1,489 had not been reviewed in the past six months. Aargh!
• 1,389 unpublished or archived pages
• More than 300 CMS author accounts but only about 50 ‘active’ authors

Step 2: Cut the crap

Continues @ http://aliceainsworth.com/?p=104