February 09, 2016
There are few things in life that I get super amped up about enough to sing their praises to the world.
I really, really love my InstaPot, Mad Max: Fury Road, eclairs from my local bakery, and Beyoncé's Grown Woman. I also feel very passionately about making your content strategy and migration tracking work for you rather than having your team work within processes that are inefficient.
Historically, the content strategy and migration tracking processes have been managed within multiple documents, shared drives, email, etc. For example, your team might have worked with an Excel spreadsheet to track your site’s information architecture and any information relevant to the migration process (subject matter expert, author, editorial review date, due date, related collateral). Content drafts were managed in multiple folders full of word documents where edits were managed with track changes often leading to confusion and incorrect content making it to the website. It definitely started to feel like a full-time job just to manage this content migration documentation and, depending on the volume of content, often felt like barely contained chaos.
I am here to tell you there have been great strides in the way we can manage content migration and your on-going editorial calendar. At the risk of sounding like a bad infomercial let me introduce – GatherContent. GatherContent is a web-based tool to help you “take control of your content production process”. More specifically, you can:
Set up your information architecture and assign templates to each page in the site
- This helps you set boundaries for your content authors to work within, hopefully reducing the edits that are needed later.
- Your authors are also able to attach all the related collateral (i.e. images, videos, pdfs) so those items are easily accessed when the content migration to your CMS begins.
Collaborate on content
- Your authoring team may be distributed geographically, the great thing about GatherContent is it can be accessed anywhere with an internet connection. Your authors can review different pages on the site and add comments to help improve & correct your content before it is published to the site.
Set-up a workflow for each page to go through
- By implementing a workflow, you can easily generate reports that allow you to know what stage each piece of content is in the site.
Set deadlines
- The calendar view allows your authors to see at a glance when their content is due and if they are on track but you can also set up reminders to be sent to your authors as their due date approaches.
Our clients that have worked with GatherContent speak highly of the quick ramp up to use and how much time and frustration it has saved them. I have personally observed that using this tool has not only improved the efficiency of the migration process but empowered our clients to take a more proactive approach to their long term content strategy.
Let us know if you want to talk more about how to approach your website’s content strategy.
