Our previous post described two key considerations when making the hard decisions around content migration:
- Content Migration & The Demands of the New Information Architecture
- Content Migration & The Popularity of the Content Today
FYI - Our whitepaper, Planning for Success: Best Practices in CMS Governance, discusses migration and other non-technical considerations critical to CMS deployment success in more detail.
Consideration Three: Importance of Content to the Organization’s Objectives
Your organization almost certainly has specific objectives for your web properties. Common objectives for public sites include selling products, generating leads, meeting regulatory requirements and deepening client relationships. Intranets are frequently designed to improve access to key corporate information, facilitate collaboration and accelerate decision-making.
Your current site probably has key content that drives objectives — whitepaper download pages, marketing calls to action, etc. This content may not be the most popular content on the site, but it is absolutely essential. Prioritize migration of this content, and make it the centerpiece of the new information architecture (although that’s another discussion).
Consideration Four: Mandatory Content
Some content must be migrated or replaced even though it is neither popular, nor instrumental in achieving your organization’s goals. A classic example is the privacy policy page. Recently, during a CMS migration process, one of our clients found that their privacy page accounted for less than 0.02% of all page views. Clearly, it didn’t make sense to retain the page based on its popularity among visitors. But given it’s importance for compliance reasons, of course it was retained.
Content Migration Considerations Five and Six
Our next (post holiday) blog will consider two additional considerations:
- Is the content stored in a structured format (a database or xml schema)?
- Is the content a self-contained microsite?