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.

Promoting complex information online – learning from advertising and using the information spectrum

How can you best ensure that any complex or detailed information you communicate is shared not only efficiently, but reaches a wide, yet relevant, audience?

A lot of people are wary of buzz-terms and vaguely dodgy analogies, and quite rightly. However, it can be useful to think of the promotion of your information in advertising terms.

Information as product

Your content/ideas/data/findings/reports are your product. Your website, where people can access and download the content, can be thought of as the shop. So the overall aim is to get people to your website and get them reading, downloading and using your content – essentially ‘buying’ your product.

A fundamental aspect of this approach is to make it obvious why your product is relevant to your audience, who are the shoppers in the advertising analogy (which I feel I may be stretching a little but you get the idea!). Basically, give them a good reason why should they visit your shop and ‘buy’ your content in particular.

Relevant vs recent

It’s also helpful at this point to think in terms of relevancy over recency – don’t feel you can only promote your latest posts – think in terms of topic and the wider context. For example, tying in your information and content with existing campaigns like local or national awareness campaigns, or linking it to current events, can be really effective in engaging a relevant audience and showing the value of your work to the discussion.

Meeting your audiences’ information needs

The audience you’re marketing to varies widely depending on the topic and nature of what you do, however it is generally important to offer a range of content to meet the information needs of varying audiences. In traditional advertising you might run different adverts across different media: a newspaper advert for an audience of commuters, a television advert aimed at a specific demographic of viewers and a radio advert for people driving on the school run for example.

So, to use this principle to promote online content, and to really maximise your reach, it is helpful to offer content along what I call the information spectrum.

I can help you with any of the communication tools in this diagram!

I developed this diagram when I worked in academia, but the concepts are easily transferable to any kind of complex information-sharing endeavour.  You can see that as well as producing a report and a matching exec summary, you may also want to consider blogging on the topic, using data visualisation and infographics to make the information more accessible and then finish it off by using social media.

This ensures that people with varying levels of interest and expertise have accessible pathways into your work and you’re not just relying on the same old email networks (even though, in the days of the Great Social Media Trash Fire, it seems much more prudent just to send an e=newsletter).