Key Points:
One of the underlying themes of content migration is that it's boring, or just a necessary evil. Worse, many just look at it as something that doesn't really need to be worried about, since at worst you could just hire a bunch of interns to cut and paste.
Perhaps you won't find content migration fun, but by looking at it through the lens might make it interesting enough for you to increase your chances of website implementation success. Here are some of the reasons you might think content migration is boring, and another way to look at it to make it more interesting:
| Boring | Interesting |
|---|---|
| Cutting and pasting | - Searching for patterns - Improving your content |
| One-time exercise | - Setting up your long-term program |
| Unending | - Develop tracking metrics |
| Unimportant | - Critical to success |
Cutting and pasting 1) Searching for patterns and 2)Improving your content
Sure, if you are the one that's stuck with cutting and pasting into a new CMS then you've got a boring task ahead of you. But hopefully the migration can be flipped a bit so that it's not structured as a cutting and pasting exercise.
First, consider looking at your content for patterns in the content. For instance, perhaps all press releases entered between 2002 and 2006 were entered in a consistent manner and can also be dealt with (hopefully automatically) similarly. At any rate, by looking for patterns you can consider the migration at large rather than immediately devolving into looking at one piece of content after another. See more reasons for using rules.
Second, consider your broader content strategy, or, perhaps more likely, use your content migration has an opportunity to define your content strategy. Your overall content strategy can help you determine to do with your content, including what content is most important and requires careful editing rather than blind cutting and pasting.
By looking for patterns and considering your overall content strategy you can: a) look for automation opportunities and b) turn the exercise into one of Editing rather than simply copying and pasting (see a comparison between editing and QAing).
One-time exercise Setting up long term program
Migration is necessarily an event. You will probably iterate on the migration LINK, but there is a definitive beginning and end. That contributes to the boredom factor, but, similar to using the migration as an opportunity for content strategy, you can also use this as an opportunity to set up a longer-term program. You will need to set up a team, training, processes, product management, and other factors in your migration. By trying to look at as setting up your overall program than just what is needed for a single migration, the task takes on a more interesting color.
Unending Develop tracking metrics
Especially for large migrations, the entire undertaking can seem almost unending. By looking at it monolithically, this encourages the "well, we better just get started" approach. But I would encourage you to look at developing useful tracking metrics that will help make it feel a bit less insurmountable. Also, looking for patterns is related since you may track against those patterns, and patterns can also help you determine what level of quality is needed for different content.
Unimportant Critical to success
Most of the macho talk around a web site might be about things that lots of people have opinions on like design or technical buzzwords. Many of us can hold our own in these discussions, and much of the time these are important and interesting discussions. But the migration task is often viewed as something that can be dealt with later, or, as mentioned above, dealt with by interns at the last moment. Why migration planning is important? Here are three quick issues:
- Migration can take much longer than expected, which means that from the project perspective there's a sudden slip at the end. Careful planning including a pilot can help reduce this risk.
- Related to the above point, if you don't plan your migration carefully, you may realize systemic problems with your implementation. For instance, you may discover functionality problems with your site, and by dealing with them as a surprise at the end is more problematic.
- Not planning effectively can mean problems persisting in your site that are difficult to correct later.
