For any new Web Content Management implementation, timely and accurate migration of content from an old to a new website is a crucial and critical factor for success. Despite its relative importance, organizations and vendors typically keep the content migration part of the project lower in their list of priorities. This leads to less than favorable outcomes for projects including cost overrun, lower team morale and eventual failure of the implementation.
Any Web Content Management implementation requires a sound strategy and a plan for migrating existing legacy content. The following approach will help in successful migration of legacy content:
- Identifying Content Source: This is the first step that one should take while developing the migration plan. Typically organizations will have multiple websites running on multiple technologies (.net, cold fusion, java etc.), acquired over a period of time through acquisitions and mergers. This makes the source of content an unwieldy mix of varied and often outdated technology layers.
- Auditing Content Volume and Type: It is critical to know what we have before we decide what we want to have. Organizations can have a host of different content types spread across a myriad of web assets. These include dynamic and static content, downloadable files, entitled and non-entitled content, etc. It is important that we create an inventory of legacy content to better scope the scale of migration.
- Migrating Legacy Content versus Creating New Content: A new Web Content Management application also gives organizations an opportunity to create fresh content targeted towards its existing and new audience through a focused branding and marketing impetus. A decision towards making new content however, has to be dealt with discipline and caution since it requires involvement and coordination of creative, marketing and legal departments. Typically these departments will have their own operational priorities and will need to fill in extra hours to create new content. A decision towards making new content however, will reduce the scope of migrating legacy content.
- Retiring Existing Content: Organizations carry a huge amount of legacy content which is no longer relevant and hardly has any footfall from viewers. This can be verified by using regular web analytics tools like google analytics which can give you an accurate picture of how popular your content is and the number of unique visitors to your website pages. Organizations using web analytics tool can get this data instantly and decide on the fate of un-popular and irrelevant content. Those organizations which do not have a breadth of analytics coverage across all web properties might have to make a decision based on experience and age of the content. Retirement of existing content also leads to less scope for migration.
- Cleaning and Enriching Content: Existing legacy content may need to be cleaned up before being migrated to the new application. This also presents an opportunity to structure and tag the content in SEO-friendly ways.
- Automated versus Manual Migration: One important decision after finalizing the scope of the migration is the method of the migration. There are quite a few options available, each of which has its own pain and gain. Typically large scale migration needs to be automated in nature. This is done either through custom built scripts or specialized migration tools which are nowadays a regular part of common Web Content Management applications. There are also some independent vendors out there who have developed proprietary migration tools for common CMS packages. However, in certain situations, doing a manual migration of the content makes more sense. Typically if the depth and volume of content for a particular channel of the new site is shallow and static in nature, it makes more sense to do a two-day manual content migration rather than spending money on creating automation scripts around them.
Diligent execution of the activities mentioned above is essential towards creating a winning site migration strategy. It is important that you are aware of what you want to migrate, the time and support needed from non-IT staff of various lines of businesses for creating fresh content or cleaning up existing content and the tolerance level for content quality post migration. Lastly, it is imperative that you make content migration higher up in the priority list of items and give advance notice to all business stakeholders of the level of commitment expected from them.
We look forward to continuing this conversation. What has been your experience while performing migration of site content? Please feel free to share your secret sauce of success or any learning experiences you may have gone through relating to content migration initiatives.
