Managing Content

No matter how much work you put into designing a great information architecture for a project and doing all the other things that need to be done, you will not have anything of value unless the structures you build are filled with content. You may be surprised at how often there is a mad scramble near the end of the project to obtain or migrate content. If you want to avoid this mad scramble, you need to have your ducks in a row well in advance.

Inventory Content and Identify Content Owners

There is usually a ton of content already in existence. Your goal is to migrate content of value, create new content where it is needed, and remove ROT (redundant, obsolete, and trivial) content. To do this properly, a content inventory needs to be taken and the content owners found. For each item of inventory, determine if it is to be migrated to the new site, archived, or deleted (according to the organization’s records management policies).