Making your website content better – part 1

Keeping your website content up to date and relevant can be quite a challenge. So it can be useful to refresh content and then implement a systematic process review of static content on your organisation’s website. This is the first in a series of 4 blogs looking at website content review processes – aimed at people working on non-commerce (ie third/charity/public sector) organisational websites.

Getting your content into shape 

I’ve managed a few content review processes in different organisations and so to kick things off here are my top tips for getting your content ship-shape and ensuring there is a rolling review process to follow in the future.

  • Map the pages of your website onto a spreadsheet for tracking progress – this seems fiddly but it’s good to have something to refer to that you can also share with others via email etc.
  • Include fields on website section, sub section, page URL, who the ‘content owner’ is, when the page was last updated (if known), notes on what needs done/status, note of next review date.
  • Assign content reviewers – ensure that each page of content has a named ‘owner’ – this may be you as the site manager or it may be someone who is an expert on the page topic/leading the research that the page describes.  This will vary from organisation to organisation and page to page.
  • Draw up brief guidelines for the subject expert content reviewers – I’ve found that people seem to like to know exactly what is expected of them – and more than ‘can you look at this page and see if it’s okay’!
  • Make word documents of all the content for review – this allows you to email people the content you need them to review, without them needing access to the website CMS and allows you to use the tracked changes tool to well, track changes… it also allows busy researchers to print and handwrite notes if they need to and work offline.
  • Explain the content review process and reasoning for having a rolling process at relevant meetings – for example the monthly team meeting for all your staff. Getting people to understand why they need to be involved is a good start!
  • Set deadlines for review to ensure a timely response – in addition to guidelines, people seem to work best if they have a deadline.
  • Email content directly to reviewers with copy of guidance, plus the URLs of the pages that they ‘own’.
  • Track progress on the spreadsheet as the reviewers send back completed review documents.

Implementing a rolling review process

Once you’ve gone through this process once it will then be easy to implement a rolling review process because a) you already have a tracker spreadsheet to follow and have content owners assigned and b) the content should only need a quick check and refresh at the next review.

I usually operate an annual review of content for organisations I have worked for, to ensure the websites are always fresh and relevant.  While the first review can be a bit time-consuming, it’s worth it – at subsequent reviews you can skip the steps involving the Word documents as there should be far fewer changes needing made and instead you can encourage team members to check their pages and email anything that needs added or updated.

Further blogs in this series

In my next blog I’ll look at the type of guidance you can give to the subject experts you’ll need to involve when dealing with complex research topics.

Following that, I’ll look at a checklist you can then follow once the content has been reviewed by the experts to ensure consistency of tone and formatting, improved SEO (search engine optimisation) etc across your website as a whole.

To finish off this series of content review blogs, I will share some of the resources I use for a bit of inspiration and examples of good practice in presenting research findings on the web.