Redesigns, Rollouts, and Migrations are Hard.
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We all need to constantly evolve our digital presences with small, incremental changes, but sometimes big, dramatic changes are required.
Change in digital marketing is constant. Digital presences are growing more complex.
As much as possible we want to evolve our digital presences (see
our book on the topic),
but inevitably we sometimes need to make large-scale changes. Why do we sometimes
need to make large-scale changes?
- Major platform upgrades or changes.
- Implementing a new digital strategy or brand.
- Search revamps, or other projects requiring pervasive change.
One key reason these projects are difficult is that digital
presences have a large amount of content, even if the organization's
attention is only on a handful of pages.
Problems can lurk deep.
Most digital presences are both broad (for instance, spanning multiple websites) and deep (with a large amount of
content that is forgotten). Regardless, unseen problems can cause projects to derail late, near planned launches.
Inefficiencies and missed opportunities multiply quickly.
Most content transformation projects are radically inefficient, doing a lot of line-by-line analysis
of content that does not deserve that attention (or that analysis is done at the wrong time in the project).
Furthermore, opportunities for content improvement are frequently missed, especially by wasting time on
less important content.
Getting stakeholder buy-in is complex.
The typical approach for doing content analysis is in spreadsheets. A spreadsheet is a poor medium to
communicate the state of your digital presence and where you are trying to go. Frequently teams think
they are in agreement but actually are not, leading to unpleasant conversations late in the process.
Don't let problems become big surprises
Plan early to avoid big surprises. You need a tool that will let you find potential problems very early,
even before designing the site since you may need to technically account for dealing with poor content
(for instance, in better templates).
Content Chimera crawls and then stores a cached version of
your digital presence. Then it can scrape and find
common problems during migrations and large content
transformations like HTML tables,
Microsoft cruft (from cutting and pasting from MS Word),
forms, and bad characters. Content Chimera not only finds where
these problems are, but allows you to chart the distribution of these
issues to best plan for these issues. This also allows you to test content
hypotheses, to help develop a content strategy that is better grounded on your existing content.
Be far more efficient and effective
Stop the spreadsheet madness. Spreadsheets encourage tunnel vision in content planning. We need to keep the big picture.
Content Chimera's interactive charts allow you to see patterns in your content, so you are looking bigger picture.
You can still drill down to the individual content, but you start more broadly. You can merge in more data on your
content from other sources (or scrape information out of pages) in order to chart that, but, even more impressive,
you can define rules for making decisions about your content. So you still have a decision on each piece of content,
but you didn't need to individually look at them to make that determination.
Decide and gain consensus early
Waving around a spreadsheet listing every piece of content will not educate, gain consensus, or help make decisions.
But a well-formed chart will. Also,
you can talk intelligently with stakeholders about the rules you are following on deciding about content,
rather than devolving into discussions about the relative merit of particular pieces of content.
Content Chimera is built for visualizations of large digital presences, for instance with a treemap to show
an entire digital presence across multiple websites. Content Chimera not only allows you to define rules about
your content, but will show you the implications of those decisions, such as how many pages the
content team needs to rewrite.
But...
-
... your current site content is garbage.
You plan on starting from scratch.
Content Chimera helps these efforts in the following ways:
not throwing out the good with the bad, better understanding the implications of the deletions (helpful in
gaining consensus),
and facilitating you better planning for the deleting effort (for instance, breaking down those that need
deep redirects).
-
... you will have our site owners look at their own content and make the necessary changes.
For small sites this approach may work fine. But for large digital presences this can mean
that motivated content owners improve their content while not much important (for the business)
content is improved. Content Chimera helps you to make broad content decisions at the organizational
level, and then improvements can be made more consistently (and in a higher-impact manner) across the teams.
-
... you already have a process for content analysis.
The current state of content analysis, especially for large sites, is pretty broken. We throw people
at line-by-line analysis, acting like staring at a spreadsheet will give us insights.
Content Chimera allows a more effective and efficient approach toward content insights, with a very
different approach centered around visualizations and rules.
-
... you are going to automatically migrate our content.
Content Chimera can help plan against poor automatic migrations, include avoiding three things:
garbage-in-garbage-out, day one quality that is impossible
to maintain, and content that breaks in new templates. Content Chimera can search for common problems
in content to help avoid these issues.
Use Content Chimera to chart a course forward in difficult and complex content transformations
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