Preparing Content to Move to a CMS

The Digital Government Strategy instructs agencies to move to an open content model, and publish digital information so it’s accessible anytime, anywhere, on any device. Implementing a content management system is the easiest way to publish open content.

The next step after choosing a content management system (CMS) is to get your content ready to move to the new system. You may already have some of these pieces in place, and if so, that will cut down on your prep work.

Key steps include:

Develop a content strategy
Conduct a content inventory
Clean up old content
Determine content structure

Content Strategy

A content strategy for your website defines such things as topics, themes and purpose, and can also play a part in site governance, customer experience, metadata and search engine optimization (SEO). The value of developing a content strategy is that it forces you to examine what you’re trying to accomplish with your digital content, where you need it delivered, and desired outcomes.

When developing your content strategy, ask questions such as:

Are you publishing content that is in your agency’s lane? Or have you strayed out of scope?
Are you reaching customers via their preferred channel?
Are you posting content once and repurposing it, or publishing the same content several times, in different ways?
Is your most important content placing well in search results?
Are you regularly gathering and acting on customer feedback to improve your site?

Read more about how to develop a content strategy

The Discipline of Content Strategy—article by Kristina Halvorson explaining the importance of content strategy
Free range content—high-level look at a good content strategy model from Vanderbilt University
Content strategy news and articles—news feed of the latest articles on content strategy from CMSWire

Content Inventory

Complete a content inventory to identify and document everything on your site. At a minimum, you should include all your Web pages. You may also want to include all linked files and attachments such as PDFs, video files, documents, pictures, etc. The best way to track your inventory is with a spreadsheet, where you can list all your content. It will help you see all your content at a glance, and illustrates how the different sections of your site fit together. It can also help you map your current content to your new CMS.

How to Conduct a Content Audit—explanation of content audits and inventories

(Note that, for this exercise, you don’t need to do a thorough review of all your content (audit); you just need to gather a list of all the content on your site (inventory) so you can track what you have, and make sure all your content is accounted for when you move to the new CMS.)

Content Inventory Spreadsheet

To get you started, we’ve developed a sample content inventory spreadsheet (MS Excel, 2 sheets, 21 KB, November 2012), which you can use to document your content inventory. The spreadsheet has two tabs: one for active content, and one to track content that you’ve archived or unpublished. The spreadsheet is organized so that you can group related pages together, following your site’s information architecture (IA). There are fields for the page name, URL, date, review schedule, content lead, and more. Tools you may find useful to develop your content inventory:

Xenu's Link Sleuth—this link check program grabs page URLs and page titles, two key pieces of information to start your inventory
Similar Page Checker—this tool compares two URLs for duplicate content
Content Inventory—Wikipedia page contains several resources

Note that a content inventory can be an invaluable tool to help you manage your digital assets. Once you’ve built it, you should continue to update and maintain it, tracking all changes you make to your site as you add or remove content.

Clean Up Your Content: Get Rid of ROT

ROT stands for Redundant, Outdated, Trivial—and if your site has been online for a few years, you undoubtedly have some content ROT that needs to be cleaned up. You’ll need to look in a few places to decide what needs to go.

Your completed content inventory can help you spot the ROT. Look for pages with similar content, and review to see if you can combine them and delete one of the pages.
Examine your metrics. Do you have pages that are only getting a few visits a month? Those pages may not be worth keeping, if no one is looking at them.
Review search terms and compare your IA to the topics and terms people search for on your site. If a topic or page has low search traffic, and low visits, review to see if it’s a candidate for removal.

Once you clean up the old, outdated content, it’ll be easier and faster to migrate your site to a CMS.

What To Cut: A Content Cropping Checklist—6 criteria to identify content that should be removed from your site
Conduct a ROT analysis to find and remove redundant, outdated, or trivial content

Determine Content Structure

One of the biggest benefits of moving to a content management system is that is makes it easy to publish open, structured content.

Structured content refers to content that is posted as "pieces of information" (vs. "pages") and tagged with keywords and metadata so it can be aggregated, organized, shared, and reused. Structured content is not dependent on any particular device; content is divorced from presentation, meaning the information is accessible anytime, anywhere, on any device.

First, you need to determine the data structure for your content, then you can configure your CMS so it’s easy to create and tag content accordingly. As an example, as part of EPA’s migration to a new CMS, they’ve identified their content structure and tag each piece of content with metadata as it’s created in the new CMS.

Create open structured content by identifying content types, taxonomies, and other approaches.
Tag your content with metadata to expose your information and make it easier to find, use and re-use.
See how EPA uses Dublin Core metadata to structure content (PDF, 109 KB, 16 pages, November 2012).