Tell me if this sounds familiar.
You spend 4 – 6 months working through a major website redesign (not including however long it took to get internal buy in), and now you have a brand spanking new website. It’s awesome.
The design is fresh and modern. The call to action is prominent on every page. The content is clean and concise. But, now it's been up for a week and you’ve noticed that your content editors are up to their old antics.
Style sheets are being ignored. Images aren’t being properly resized. Someone figured out how to make the primary font Times New Roman even though the developer has done everything they could to make that an impossibility. All the hard work you put in is being washed away and the excitement you experienced by clicking on your home page has been replaced by a embarrassed and uncomfortable shudder.
How did this happen?
You did everything you could right. You created detailed project specs, hired a highly reputable firm, and selected a great CMS. Yet upper management is asking why the site is turning into a circus?
There are two primary reasons why this can happen:
- The content strategy was neglected
- Training was not given the level of importance it deserves
Content Strategy
Content strategy encompasses a number of different processes and sub-strategies towards identifying how your content/metadata/etc. is structured and in essence, managed. Metadata is content. Web copy is content. Images are content. Twitter posts are content. By planning out your content strategy prior to development, you’re not only increasing the effectiveness of the design, you’re also setting guidelines for your authors to follow. It’s the latter that is more difficult to control…
Creating a strategy can involve massive changes to the structure of the website, the actual content itself, the metadata used to tag content, and more. Many companies just regurgitate content from their old site into the new one, but that's not a good plan. You're redesigning the site because you want to change it's effectiveness. Content is one of the key elements that's going to determine how effective your website is!
Invest in Training
Change is hard. People are going to do things the way it's comfortable to them unless you give them a reason to change (value prop). As developers, we can use CSS and other technologies to limit their options, but in the end, content authors need to be disciplined. By training your staff, providing help aids, manuals, and ongoing training, you can change your author's behavior.
Start by creating a style guide for the site. The style guide will outline the different styles that are available in a clear and concise document (online or printed). It will also reaffirm to site authors the importance of maintaining branding standards, which sometimes gets lost when you have non-marketing staff contributing (not to knock non-marketers, but we're not all trained to think that way, that's all).
Like any successful project, everything starts with planning. Bring trainers onsite to show users examples of the type of tasks they will be doing and how they should be doing them. Develop a workflow so that content authors are held accountable for not following established guidelines. Limit style-related choices (in the Ektron CMS, we can enable/disable font/color/style choices based on permission levels). Penalize users if they aren't adhering to the new style guide. Set consequences for their actions.
Authors won't change bad habits until they understand why it's bad, and what the correct way is.
How to avoid this mistake?
Well, getting rid of all the content authors that don’t view the website exactly as you do isn’t an option... And even if it were, we'd still recommend investing in content strategy.
Focus on developing a clearly defined content strategy during discovery. The earlier this discussion occurs in the process, the better. And make sure that once the site is built, you don’t ignore the strategy that the entire project was based on.
The other key element is getting buy in from your authorship, and the way to accomplish that is going to vary on a company by company basis. I’m not going to tell you how to motivate your team to not screw up your website, but something as simple as demonstrating the difference between ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ pages can have a lasting impact.
In the end, it all comes back to something I learned as a child -- if you take good care of something, you'll enjoy it more and it will last longer. The web is no different. Take good care of your site and you won't have to worry about investing in a redesign every six months.