Content migration strategy services

Make an effective, efficient move

Doing a website or intranet redesign? Moving your site to a new platform? These are both great times to improve your audience’s experience and get them to come back more often. We can show you how to take stock, clean up your content, and make decisions to improve the way your content is used.

Streamline your content

When a large organization sets out to make major changes to its content, there are a lot of choices to make. What do you keep and what do you archive or delete? How will the change affect the audience’s experience? And how can you simplify your content while ensuring that your goals are met?

Decide what to keep and how to move it

The custom content migration strategy we build for you will recommend ways to streamline your process, direct your rollout, and ensure that your new site is effective and user-focused. We can also help you execute those recommendations, including:

• Developing an audience-focused content strategy.
• Building a content lifecycle management strategy.
• Writing content.

A tailored plan for a more effective, user-focused website

We use research to create a comprehensive content migration strategy that stays focused on your audience. We learn about your organization and content users, and build out detailed recommendations. Whether you need guidance from start to finish, or help with one specific part, our plan will offer recommendations and tools. This includes ways to:

• Clean up and improve your content to refocus it on your audience’s needs.
• Improve usability and consistency with new content models and page structures.
• Streamline your content migration processes.

Working with us, step by step

Your organization is unique, including your challenges, goals, and your project’s scope. Before we start, we create a custom plan with clear stages and key activities at each point, so you know what to expect as we go forward.

1. Stage 1: Discovery and strategy

   We take a deep look at your objectives, content, and technology, using research and data to identify gaps and challenges in your current approach to migrating content.

   • Activities

     We start by gathering information about your:

     • Business objectives.
     • Employee, stakeholder, and audience needs.
     • Web content creation and migration processes.
     • Project goals and constraints.

     We also conduct website, technology, and content research, including:

     • Existing research and documents.
     • Current content and how useful and audience-friendly it is.
     • Technical systems, resourcing capabilities, and constraints.

   • Deliverables

     At this stage, we deliver comprehensive reports that detail:

     • A content assessment of your current website.
     • Key findings and insights related to business, audience, and stakeholder needs.
     • Specific problems and gaps, as well as notes on what’s working.

     We will also deliver a cohesive action plan to implement the recommendations, including:

     • Considerations for where each page should be positioned within the new site.
     • Priorities, with specific tasks and tactics to be accomplished.
     • Who will do the work and how it will happen, within the context of your budget and timeline.

2. Stage 2: Design

   At this stage, we define the website and page structures and user-focused design solutions. We also recommend improvements to the content migration process.

   • Activities

     To design your content migration strategy, we work collaboratively with your team, IT department, and designers. This may include activities such as:

     • A migration audit to determine what needs to happen with each piece of content.
     • Information architecture design and usability testing.
     • Identification of groups of pages with similar structures, and building of content models for them.
     • Consolidate currently and potentially important terms, keywords, and phrases into a taxonomy and metadata framework.

   • Deliverables

     You’ll come out of this stage with detailed documentation that may define things such as:

     • A streamlined process for content migration, including a visual flow chart.
     • Our recommended information architecture.
     • The results of your migration audit, which includes specific instructions for each existing page of content, for example:
       • Which ones should be rewritten, updated, merged, split, archived, deleted, and/or moved.
       • Which ones need to be updated or rewritten based on input from your subject-matter experts.
       • Where pages fit within the architecture of the new website.
     • Page types and corresponding content models for each, detailing page structures and components for similar pages.
     • A taxonomy and metadata framework to improve user search and content organization and management.

3. Stage 3: Validation

   Our recommendations are always based in research, so we test and validate carefully. This may include testing:

   • The sitemap and information architecture with sample audiences, to ensure that the navigation is intuitive, clear, and functional.
   • Usability, including taxonomies and content models.
   • To ensure our solutions are realistic for your internal stakeholders, and are easy to maintain over time, within your budget and organizational skillsets.

4. Stage 4: Development

   When you execute your content migration strategy, the development work will include:

   • Revising old content or writing new materials to meet the standards that were created during the design stage.
   • Establishing content-support tools such as standards and guidelines, and style guides and templates, and a user-focused taxonomy to support development.
   • Applying metadata and tagging requirements.

   Before, during or after your content migration, we can support your content development in one of several different ways. We can:

   1. Train your team to develop the content in-house.
   2. Train your team to develop the content in-house with editorial oversight from us to ensure it meets the new standards.
   3. Carry out all of the development work for you.

5. Stage 5: Publication and maintenance

   Armed with the content migration strategy developed during the design stage, your IT team will move the developed content into your CMS and publish it.

Related content

• Articles: Detailed discussions of content migration strategy planning and challenges.