Launching a new website is a great opportunity to improve your website's content. Whether it's a full-scale audit of your entire site, or refining your organization's governance practices, there are a number of different tasks related to content that you may want to carry out as part of a broader project that our team can help you with.
Content Inventory and Audit
The first step for most content work is to get a sense of your content's current state. This is done by compiling a content inventory, which is basically a list of all the content on your site. This can include just the pages themselves, with a URL and page title for reference, or additional content like any documents, images, or content embedded on the page.
A content audit will build on the inventory, and involves reviewing the quality and relevancy of the content on your site based on pre-determined criteria. Content audits will help you identify any gaps in your information architecture, opportunities for updating stale content, and content that may no longer be needed.
Read more from Lullabot: Content Audits - A Heavy Lift for a Huge Payoff
Content Modelling
Content modelling is an important step in developing an overall content strategy for your website. This involves determining what content types you need on your new site, and how they'll work. A content type is any content element on your site that requires its own unique fields and display, based on its purpose and the kind of content it contains.
Once content types are determined based on your content audit and organization's needs (read more about content types), they must be modelled so that a development team can build them in Drupal. The content model outlines what fields are needed and how they should function for each content type.
Information Architecture and Site Mapping
Once you've completed a content inventory and audit, those findings can be used to build a new information architecture for your website. Information architecture captures how your content is organized, categorized and labelled, which includes, but is not limited to, your sitemap.
As part of this step, you may choose to conduct user testing in one of two ways (or both!) A card sort exercise can be done internally or with external participants to help get a sense of how content should be grouped together based on user's mental models. A tree test, meanwhile, can help determine the effectiveness of your proposed sitemap by testing how users navigate through it to complete a set of tasks.
Review our Sitemap Best Practices or read more from Optimal Workshop: Tree testing 101 and Card sorting 101.
Content Strategy
Content strategy is a broad topic that can be tricky to define. In general, though, content strategy involves the planning, creation and governance of your content. A website project is a great time to reevaluate your current content strategy (if you have one!) to address what is and isn't working, as well as what can be improved on with the features available to you on your new website.
While content strategy can be broad, there are two areas you may want to focus on during your content overhaul: governance and style.
Content Governance
Content governance is the system in which your content is drafted, reviewed, published, and refreshed on your website. It can include considerations like who is allowed to publish content directly, versus who must submit content for review. With Drupal, we are able to create user roles for your site that ensure this system is followed.
When creating a new content governance plan, or when documenting the system you currently use, you may want to explore the common types of governance models to figure out which approach works best for your team. Knowing the type of governance model you're working with can help you find areas for improvement and ensure that your content is consistent.
Check out our article on content governance models for more information on finding an approach that works for your team.
Content Style Guide
A content style guide helps ensure that the content drafted by your editors is consistent, and matches your organization's tone and voice. Content style guides are beneficial for organizations to have—especially if you are working within a decentralized content governance model where multiple people are responsible for drafting content.
Your content style guide can include as much direction as you would like, but in general, we recommend including:
- Tone and voice guidelines: this helps ensure your organization's content is consistent and on brand, and conveys the right message to your desired audience.
- Image or photography direction: guidelines regarding the type, size, and style of images used on your website can ensure a cohesive feel across your website.
- Page styling guidance: this can include instructions for how to use the content rows or elements available to content editors.
Content Editing and Writing
Once you've audited your content, identified what to remove or consolidate, built a new information architecture, and developed a content strategy for your new site moving forward, it's time to prepare your content. Depending on findings and decisions made in the previous steps, your content may just be in need of some light edits, or a more in-depth rewrite might be necessary for parts of it.
Editing your content can involve making adjustments to accommodate consolidated content, restructuring it for easier scannability, or rewriting it to match your organization's voice and tone. Your audit can also be used prioritize certain pages for editing, especially if your organization is working under a time constraint. Start with pages that need to be edited for accessibility, or start with pages that you know are going to be consolidated.
Content Migration
Whether you have drafted all-new content for your site, or you're using your website's existing content as is, you'll need to migrate it to your new website. There are several approaches to migration, including using the page management tools to keep track of migration details and progress, keeping that information in a separate tracking sheet, or programmatically importing content where possible. Content migration is also an opportunity to improve the structure and accessibility of your content, taking advantage of any features that your new website's CMS (content management system) offers.
Learn more about how you can improve your content's accessibility during migration.
Content Maintenance
Content work is rarely finished once your website launches! Having a plan for maintaining your content is important. As part of your content governance plan, you should include a schedule for reviewing and refreshing different types of content. Depending on the amount of content on your site, or your teams' capacity, outsourcing some maintenance may be helpful, like with Upanup's accessibility maintenance services. Regardless of your approach, content maintenance is important to ensure your content stays as fresh as the day your website launched.
If you would like to discuss your next web project and possible content work, we would be happy to learn about your goals.
Please contact us to start a conversation or request a quote.