As noted in a previous blog post on content migration, getting content from your existing site or intranet into a new content management solution can be challenging. In the process, most organizations find that they need to decide to retain, eliminate or replace content.
Consideration One: The Information Architecture
The key question here: does the content in question need to be changed, given the information architecture of the new site? If the site is being redesigned or restructured, there may be no way to include all the content from the existing site in the new site. Existing content may need to be restructured in smaller modules, combined to form new blocks of content or presented conditionally as part of a personalization project. And so on. The information architecture of the redesigned site will drive many decisions on whether content lives on and is migrated intact, or is eliminated or rewritten. Automated migration tools will not help you with the process of restructuring content.
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Consideration Two: Content Popularity
You probably have a reliable source of information on user demand for existing content, such as Google Analytics or some other trusted system. Usually, you can run a report ranking content from most viewed to least viewed. In almost all cases, you will find that a small percentage of content drives the vast majority of page views. For example, during a recent project, an NLC client found that 1.5% of the organization’s web pages (the top 500 pages) accounted for 80.5% of all page views. The 501st most popular page accounts for only 0.03 percent of all page views.
You can’t simply focus on these top pages —the other 34,500 pages on the client’s site are connected to the top pages, and may not make sense without these linked pages. That said, it is critical to include current popularity as a consideration in determining whether (or when) to migrate existing content.
Considerations Three and Four
Our next post will discuss two additional considerations in determining which content makes the cut: