Plan the Buildout
Step-by-step instructions for populating your new website
Use this guide to plan the buildout of your site. This rubric will help ensure that you stay on task, don't miss anything important, and build a website that meets your communications goals.
Prep Work
The better you understand your content, the better you can plan how to reach the results you’d like to achieve. To do this, you’ll need to perform some analysis of your content. This can be a simple list of all your content assets or as sophisticated as including SEO audits and comparisons to the websites and analytics of your competitors. Start with what you have immediate access to.
The purpose of user research is to identify previously unknown variables that affect the success of your project and to center the experience of your users as the foundation of your project's goals. User experience (UX) is a user-centered design process that focuses on having a deep understanding of users’ wants and needs, values, abilities, and limitations. Identifying these things will help you understand the problem you're trying to solve; it tells you who your users are, in what context they'll be using your product or service, and ultimately, what they need from you.
User research and the content audit can happen concurrently. Contact the Center of Excellence for User Experience and Design for help.
Migration
Based on what you learn from the content audit, SEO and analytics audit, and user research, decide whether each piece of content should be archived, deleted, migrated as is, or recast. Also, what new content should be created?
Things to Consider
- What are your top 25-50 worst-performing pages? Why?
- For news content more than four years old, unless analytics show that it’s performing well, gauge whether it makes more sense to archive it somewhere other than your website or migrate this content as unpublished pages if your website is your archive.
Add all of this information to the audit document. Next, organize the content into buckets. There might be several ways to organize your content efficiently; choose the structure that is the best match for your website editorial mission and that will maximize engagement from your audiences. You can organize content by type (news, events, courses), tasks (merchandise for sale, applications, registration), or categories of a single type of content (books, academic papers, magazine articles). The labels for these buckets will become your main navigation.
Decide which content type to use for each webpage and add this information to the content audit document. With most webpages, this will be obvious—news, events, person profiles—but for others, you may have to get creative. For example, you may have dozens of fantastic photographs but aren't sure what to do with them. They could be housed in the Gallery content type, Bookshelf, or even News Article. Choose the content type that will maximize user engagement.
Your staging site looks great; all links are working. Then the site launches and half the links are broken across hundreds of pages.
Avoid this common pitfall by learning the proper way to build anchors and hyperlinks.
Divvy up your content based on IA or content type and reorder it into two-week sprints. Be realistic about how many pages can be built during each sprint.
Things to consider:
- Do you have high-quality images for every page that needs them?
- Has all of your content been fact checked and edited?
- Do you know how to ensure that your content is accessible?
- Will staff work on your migration project full time during each sprint or only a few hours each week?
- How many staff are available to work on the project, and do they all know how to use the platform?
Create a tab or section in your content audit document to lay out the details of each sprint: how many pages will be built in each one, the dates each will start and end, and who will build which pages. Lastly, build out all pages methodically, starting with Sprint 1.
Once you've completed all the sprints, you're ready to launch.